Enhancing Crowd-Sourced Video Sharing through P2P-Assisted HTTP Video Streaming

Abstract

This paper introduces a decentralized architecture designed for the sharing and distribution of user-generated video streams. The proposed system employs HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) as the delivery method for these video streams. In the architecture, a creator who captures a video stream using a smartphone camera subsequently transcodes it into a sequence of video chunks called HLS segments. These chunks are then stored in a distributed manner across the worker network, forming the core of the proposed architecture. Despite the presence of a coordinator for bootstrapping within the worker network, the selection of worker nodes for storing generated video chunks and autonomous load balancing among worker nodes are conducted in a decentralized fashion, eliminating the need for central servers. The worker network is implemented using the Golang-based IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) client, called kubo, leveraging essential IPFS functionalities such as node identification through Kademlia-DHT and message exchange using Bitswap. Beyond merely delivering stored video streams, the worker network can also amalgamate multiple streams to create a new composite stream. This bundling of multiple video streams into a unified video stream is executed on the worker nodes, making effective use of the FFmpeg library. To enhance download efficiency, parallel downloading with multiple threads is employed for retrieving the video stream from the worker network to the requester, thereby reducing download time. The result of the experiments conducted on the prototype system indicates that those concerned with the transmission time of the requested video streams compared with a server-based system using AWS exhibit a significant advantage, particularly evident in the case of low-resolution video streams, and this advantage becomes more pronounced as the stream length increases. Furthermore, it demonstrates a clear advantage in scenarios characterized by a substantial volume of viewing requests.