Challenges in supporting non-linear and non-continuous media access in P2P systems

Abstract

With the proliferation of interactive media, non-linear and noncontinuous media accesses have become a norm. Examples of such interactive media include video-on-demand, massive multiplayer virtual environments, massively multiplayer online game, zoomable video, Google Earth, and free-viewpoint video. To enable scalable delivery of these media contents to potentially millions of users, P2P architecture is often adopted. Non-linear and non-continuous user access pattern, however, pose new challenges on P2P interactive media streaming systems. These challenges include the need of more sophisticated prefetching scheme, increasing server load, high demand for short content discovery time, and difficulty of bandwidth allocation. We first try to understand the effect of non-linear and non-continuous media access on the streaming system performance, in particular, the server load, through analytical modeling. Then a novel user access pattern driven content discovery mechanism is proposed to address the content discovery challenge during non-continuous access. Works aiming at the rest of challenges are ongoing.

Current Trends, Characteristics, Challenges and Future of P2P

“…And according to reference [8] there are several quality challenges of P2P, which includes "distributed character"; "undefined scale"; "peer fluctuation"; "peer heterogeneity" and "static configurations are insufficient". Other important challenges are: "video streaming over P2P", [10]; "Supporting non-liner and non-continuous media access over P2P" [11]; "support complex and heterogeneous decentralized environments" [12]; "stability of target systems"; "the latency of forward of nodes among multiple layers"; "dependability of communications among nodes" and many more [13].…”

Joserlin

“…Nonlinear access pattern creates uncertainty in user accesses: given the current set of media objects accessed, more than one possible set of objects can be accessed next. Such non-linear access pattern poses many new challenges on P2P streaming systems [35], one of which is the request and service scheduling, the focus of this paper.…”