Server-aided adaptive video streaming over multi-hop path

The P2P streaming system must have the adaptation ability to the heterogeneity of the peer nodes and networks. In this paper, an adaptive scheme on video streaming over multi-hop path in P2P networks, called Server-Aided Intermediate Node Adaptive Transmission (SA-INAT), is proposed. In the scheme, the streaming server probes the network parameters in the multi-hop path periodically, and adjusts the output bit-rate and the encoding structure according to the probing result. Before relay the obtained streaming data, the intermediate peer nodes elegantly discard some frames to adapt the output rate to the bandwidth while alleviating the degradation in the decoding video quality in a delay-constrained manner. The experimental results show that the video data can be streamed over the multi-hop path efficiently and adaptively by the cooperation among the streaming server and the intermediate nodes.