Cooperative patching: a client based P2P architecture for supporting continuous live video streaming

Abstract

We propose a cooperative patching architecture to achieve continuous live video streaming to a set of cooperative but unreliable end hosts. In this design, each end host caches an initial portion of the video content before playback. It then keeps the video that has been played out for a certain time before discarding it. An end host maintains a list of patching parents, and retrieves lost data from one of its patching parents. Any end host that has the requested video content can be a patching parent. Several parent selection algorithms are proposed and evaluated in this paper. This architecture relieves server load by completely shifting video patching responsibility to the client side. Video content is replicated in multiple locations across the overlay network to provide fast and timely data recovery. Cooperative patching is especially advantageous for legacy video systems, since it does not require modification of the video server. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our design can achieve continuous video streaming with moderate cost