A P2P platform for real-time multicast video streaming leveraging on scalable multiple descriptions to cope with bandwidth fluctuations

In the immediate future video distribution applications will increase their diffusion thanks to the ever-increasing user capabilities and improvements in the Internet access speed and performance. The target of this paper is to propose a content delivery system for real-time streaming services based on a peer-to-peer approach that exploits multicast overlay organization of the peers to address the challenges due to bandwidth heterogeneity. To improve reliability and flexibility, video is coded using a scalable multiple description approach that allows delivery of sub-streams over multiple trees and allows rate adaptation along the trees as the available bandwidth changes. Moreover, we have deployed a new algorithm for tree-based topology management of the overlay network. In fact, tree based overlay networks better perform in terms of end-to-end delay and ordered delivery of video flow packets with respect to mesh based ones. We also show with a case study that the proposed system works better than similar systems using only either multicast or multiple trees.