Using Bittorrent and SVC for Efficient Video Sharing and Streaming

Massive and large scale content distribution over Internet is attracting a lot of research efforts as many challenges remain to be solved. Recent studies show that Internet video including video-to-TV and video calling is dominating the Internet traffic. As Internet becomes widely accessible to wired, mobile and wireless users, it is important to design a system that can ensure video streaming across variable network conditions while simultaneously handling devices and end-user heterogeneities. Most of the proposed solutions, such as CDN and peer-to-peer (P2P), solve the scalability problem but fail to handle receiver's heterogeneity. In this paper, we combine P2P network and SVC (Scalable Video Coding) to provide an efficient video sharing and streaming system. Our solution consists of an SVC layered extension of the widely used Bittorrent protocol to support real-time content delivery with different video qualities given the receivers capabilities. Thus, we propose different optimization techniques to organize peers in an overlay. The results, obtained by means of simulation, show that our system outperforms solutions that relay on single layer streams such as AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and this in terms of receivers perceived QoS.