Live peer-to-peer streaming with scalable video coding and networking coding

We present the design of a peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming system that uses scalable video coding as well as network coding. The proposed design enables flexible customization of video streams to support heterogeneous receivers, highly utilizes upload bandwidth of peers, and quickly adapts to network and peer dynamics. Our design is simple and modular. Therefore, other P2P streaming systems could also benefit from various components of our design to improve their performance. We conduct an extensive quantitative analysis to demonstrate the expected performance gain from the proposed design. Our analysis uses actual scalable video traces and realistic P2P streaming environments with high churn rates, heterogeneous peers, and flash crowd scenarios. Our results show that the proposed system can achieve: (i) significant improvement in the visual quality perceived by peers (several dBs are observed), (ii) smoother and more sustained streaming rates, (iii) higher streaming capacity by serving more requests from peers, and (iv) more robustness against high churn rates and flash crowd arrivals of peers. This paper shows that the integration of network coding and scalable video coding in P2P live streaming systems yields better performance than current systems that use single-layer streams and proposed systems that use either network coding alone or scalable video coding alone.