P2P video streaming combining SVC and MDC

In this paper we propose and evaluate a combined SVC-MDC (Scalable Video Coding & Multiple Description Video Coding) video coding scheme for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video multicast. The proposed scheme is based on a full cooperation established between the peer sites, which contribute their upload capacity during video distribution. The source site splits the video content into many small blocks and assigns each block to a single peer for redistribution. Our solution is implemented in a fully meshed P2P network in which peers are connected to each other via UDP (User Datagram Protocol) links. The video content is encoded by using the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) method. We present a flow control mechanism that allows us to optimize dynamically the overall throughput and to automatically adjust video quality for each peer. Thus, peers with different upload capacity receive different video quality. We also combine the SVC method with Multiple Description Coding (MDC) to alleviate the packet loss problem. We implemented and tested this approach in the PlanetLab infrastructure. The obtained results show that our solution achieves good performance and remarkable video quality in the presence of packet loss.