A Cost-Effective Buffer Map Notification Scheme for P2P VoDs Supporting VCR Operations

Abstract

SUMMARYIn this paper, we propose a new buffer map notification scheme for Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand systems (P2P VoDs) which support VCR operations such as fast-forward, fast-backward, and seek. To enhance the fluidity of such VCR operations, we need to refine the size of each piece as small as possible. However, such a refinement significantly degrades the performance of buffer map notification schemes with respect to the overhead, piece availability and the efficiency of resource utilizations. The basic idea behind our proposed scheme is to use a piece-based buffer map with a segment-based buffer map in a complementary manner. The result of simulations indicates that the proposed scheme certainly increases the accuracy of the information on the piece availability in the neighborhood with a sufficiently low cost, which reduces the intermittent waiting time of each peer by more than 40% even under a situation in which 50% of peers conduct the fast-forward operation over a range of 30% of the entire video.

Hierarchical Architecture for Peer-to-Peer Video on Demand Systems with the Notion of Dynamic Swarms

“…The reader should note that such an overlay of SPs can effectively support VCR operations such as the fast forward and the jump to a specific chapter [14]. In fact, since each swarm consists of peers to have similar PPs, each peer p can quickly identify an appropriate uploader after (or during) conducting a VCR operation, if p could identify an SP whose PP is close to the PP of p through the overlay of SPs.…”

“…This indicates that the heavy load of media servers will easily degrade the quality of streaming services in terms of the delay, jitter and the temporary suspension of the playback. With such a background, video-on-demand using peer-to-peer technology (P2P VoD, for short) has become a promising approach to reduce the load of the servers by distributing it to all participant users [3], [6], [9], [13], [14], [16].…”