FLoD: A Framework for Peer-to-Peer 3D Streaming

Abstract

Abstract-Interactive 3D content on Internet has yet become popular due to its typically large volume and the limited network bandwidth. Progressive content transmission, or 3D streaming, thus is necessary to enable real-time content interactions. However, the heavy data and processing requirements of 3D streaming challenge the scalability of client-server delivery methods. We propose the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for 3D streaming, and argue that due to the non-linear access patterns of 3D content, P2P 3D streaming is a new class of applications apart from existing media streaming and requires new investigations.We also present FLoD, the first P2P 3D streaming framework that allows clients of 3D virtual globe or virtual environment (VE) applications to obtain relevant data from other clients while minimizing server resource usage. To demonstrate how FLoD applies to real-world scenarios, we build a prototype system that adapts JPEG 2000-based 3D mesh streaming for P2P delivery. Experiments show that server-side bandwidth usage can thus be reduced, while simulations indicate that P2P 3D streaming is fundamentally more scalable than client-server approaches.

Streaming 3D meshes over thin mobile devices

“…Zoning Techniques: Another set of filtering mechanisms that have been discussed in the literature [3] make use of the zoning techniques. When dealing with 3D environments and in order to restrict the interest of a user, proximity is manifestly the criteria to take into account, since entities close to the clients will have nearly the same view of the VE, and will likely share the same interest.…”

“…Each user will only receive data and updates related to objects within its region, or adjacent regions. Different shapes were adopted during the zoning, such as honeycomb regions [2], or voronoi diagram [3]. However, one of the significant drawbacks of the zoning-based techniques is that the amount of data filtered is highly dependent on the size of the zone.…”

“…A considerable number of solutions [3] used P2P streaming over wired networks and several frameworks such as FLoD [3], aiming at providing scalability in NVE, have been implemented. In wireless networks, we notice that existing research works focused on video streaming and proposed P2P based protocols for video streaming over thin mobile devices [7].…”

“…However, given that the size of the VE application is growing exponentially, the pre-installation is no more a feasible approach. To overcome this issue, most of the applications opted for 3D streaming that consists of gradually downloading and rendering 3D content such as meshes and textures to permit the interaction of the user with its virtual world without a full download or a pre-installation [3]. Streaming 3D meshes is not easy to realize given that it is network bandwidth consuming.…”

Interest‐driven avatar neighbor‐organizing for P2P transmission in distributed virtual worlds

“…The nodes will then need to exchange messages frequently to determine the neighbor relationship, and this will cause heavy network loads and long transmission latencies . Currently, whether in structured P2P networks such as SimMud , Colyseus , and prediction binary tree (PBT) , or in unstructured P2P networks such as pSense and Voronoi‐based overlay network , even in hybrid P2P networks, a node's frequent moves, joining, and leaving will all lead to many changes in neighbors, which makes it very difficult to maintain the neighbor table/distributed hash table (DHT). Mitigating the impact of the churn in the neighbor table is an urgent problem for the transmission of large‐scale virtual scenes.…”