LayerP2P: A New Data Scheduling Approach for Layered Streaming in Heterogeneous Networks

Although layered streaming in heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks has drawn great interest in recent years, there's still a lack of systematical studies on its data scheduling issue. In this paper, the authors propose a new scheduling approach for layered video streaming, called LayerP2P. The key idea and main contributions of LayerP2P come in two-fold: According to the characteristics caused by layered coding, they propose four objectives that should be achieved by data scheduling: high throughput, high layer delivery ratio, low useless packets ratio, and low subscription jitter; The authors design a 3-stage scheduling mechanism to request absent blocks, where the min-cost flow model, probability decision mechanism and multi-window remedy mechanism are employed in Free Stage, Decision Stage and Remedy Stage, respectively.