A peer-to-peer framework for cost-effective on-demand media streaming

Abstract

This paper presents a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) framework for cost-effective on-demand media streaming, named BitVampire. BitVampire's primary design goal is to aggregate peers' storage and upstream bandwidths to facilitate on-demand media streaming. To achieve this goal, BitVampire splits published videos into segments and distributes them to different peers. When a peer (or a receiver) wants to watch a video, it (i) searches the corresponding segments, then (ii) selfishly determines the best subset of supplying peers and parallel downloads the desired media content from these peers in real-time mode. In BitVampire, participating peers help each other to get the desired content, thus powerful servers/proxies are not necessary, which makes it a cost-effective approach. To demonstrate the feasibility of BitVampire, We implemented a prototype using Java and JMF (Java Media Framework), and conducted some preliminary experiments.