A Survey on Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Systems

Video-over-IP applications have recently attracted a large number of users on the Internet. Traditional client-server based video streaming solutions incur expensive bandwidth provision cost on the server. Peer-To-Peer (P2P) networking is a new paradigm to build distributed network applications. Recently, several P2P streaming systems have been deployed to provide live and on-demand video streaming services on the Internet at low server cost. In this paper, the authors provide a survey on the existing P2P solutions for live and on-demand video streaming. Representatives P2P streaming systems, including tree, multi-tree and mesh based systems are introduced. They describe the challenges and solutions of providing live and on-demand video streaming in P2P environment.