Abstract:As broadband network services and video streaming systems become more common, high-definition (HD) quality stream format has become increasingly popular in live video distribution. Today's video streaming systems are used for a variety of purposes, but those systems require much bandwidth and CPU power for video streams. In this paper, we focus on the design of a relay path selection method on community-based resource sharing networks, which is able to select and use suitable stream paths cooperatively in sharing resources. On live video distribution, a candidate relay path list is created when users request to receive live video streams, and the best path is selected. If a new relay node is required, the suitable relay node is placed on a shared terminal in consideration of available resource status. Our experiments by a prototype system show that our method is successful in realisation of the suitable relay path selection and live video streaming on shared terminals.Keywords: live video distribution; cooperative video streaming system; community-based resource sharing networks; HD/SD quality video stream; relay path selection method.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Kawano, Y., Hashimoto, K. and Shibata, Y. (2011) 'A relay path selection method for video streaming on shared terminals', Int.