Live Streaming / Video-on-Demand : An Integration

Abstract: Video delivery over the Internet is becoming increasingly popular and comes in many flavors, such as Live Streaming and Video-on-Demand. In the recent years, many peer to peer solutions for Live Streaming and VoD have been proposed as opposed to the centralized solutions that are not scalable due to the high bandwidth requirements. In all existing solutions, Live Streaming and VoD have traditionally and artificially been considered as separate technical problems. We propose an integrated Live Streaming with VoD system that offers the potential for users to watch live TV with short delays. In Live Streaming, peers are interested in the content that is being generated live by the streaming source, unlike VoD in which peers are interested in the content that has been generated from the beginning of the streaming. In this manner, Live nodes can contribute to VoD nodes and send them the pieces they have downloaded since their joining time. In this work, we demonstrate that our system, called Live-VoD, brings out the possibility of having both types of nodes in one system, each being served based on their interest. We propose a P2P Live-VoD protocol for overlay construction based on peer’s upload bandwidth that is built on top of the Gradient topology and an innovative algorithm based on the number of pieces peers can contribute to each other. We also propose an innovative stochastic algorithm for data dissemination based on the rareness of the piece and the requesting node’s download position. Our experiments show that Live-VoD is decentralized, scalable and self-organizing. We also show that even when most of the nodes in the system are VoDs, all VoD nodes regardless of their joining time, manage to download the whole movie with no assistance from the streaming source.