Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming with Guaranteed QoS for Future Real-time Applications

Peer-to-Peer multimedia streaming is expected to grow rapidly in the near future. Packet losses during transmission are a serious problem for streaming media as they result in degradation of the quality of service (QoS). Forward Error Correction (FEC) is a promising technique to recover the lost packets and improve the QoS of streaming media. However, FEC may degrade the QoS of all streaming due to the increased congestion caused by the FEC overhead when streaming sessions increase. Although streaming media can be categorized into live and on-demand streaming contents, conventional FEC methods apply the same FEC scheme for both contents without distinguishing them. In this paper, we clarify the effective ranges where each conventional FEC and Retransmission scheme works well. Then, we propose a novel FEC method that distinguishes two types of streaming media and is applied for on-demand streaming contents. It can overcome the adverse effect of the FEC overhead in on-demand streaming contents during media streaming and therefore reduce the packet loss due to the FEC overhead. As a result, the packet loss ratios of both live and on-demand streaming contents are improved. Moreover, it provides the QoS according to the requirements and environments of users by using layered coding of FEC. Thus, packet losses are recovered at each end host and do not affect the next-hop streaming. The numerical analyses show that our proposed method highly improves the packet loss ratio compared to the conventional method.