Is High-Quality VoD Feasible using P2P Swarming?

Peer-to-peer technologies are increasingly becoming the medium of choice for delivering media content, both professional and home-grown, to large user populations. Indeed, current P2P swarming systems have been shown to be very efficient for large-scale content distribution with few server resources.However, such systems have been designed for generic file distribution and provide a limited user experience for viewing media content.For example, users need to wait to download the full video before they can start watching it.In general, the main challenge resides in designing systems that ensure that users can start watching a movie at any point in time, with small start-up times and sustainable playback rates. In this work, we address the issues of providing a Video-on-Demand (VoD) using P2P mesh-based networks. We show that providing high quality VoD using P2P is feasible using a combination of techniques including (a) network coding, (b) optimized resource allocation across different parts of the video, and (c) overlay topology management algorithms.Our evaluation also shows that systems that do not use these techniques and do not optimize all of those dimensions can significantly under-utilize the network resources and result in poor VoD performance.Our results are based on simulations and results from a prototype implementation.