P2P live streaming system for multi-view video with fast switching

With diversification of content distribution systems, multi-view video distribution services, particularly in real-time services, will become popular in the future. To distribute many contents to many users, P2P live streaming systems are expected due to its high scalability. Because of this characteristic, P2P live streaming systems are also suitable for multi-view video distribution services. However, current P2P live streaming systems typically configure one P2P overlay network to distribute one video and they do not take multi-view service into account. Hence, it takes long delay during changing views because users search available P2P nodes and obtain data from them. Such long switching delay makes worse impact to multi-view video distribution services compared with current P2P live streaming systems. To realize attractive multi-view video distribution systems, this delay issue has to be solved. We have proposed a dedicated server, which is called “Zapping Server”, to help users switch view video for P2P live streaming system. In this paper, we propose a framework of fast view video switching service with Zapping Server for multi-view streaming services. In order to decrease switching time, Zapping Server helps newly joined users to connect to available nodes. Specifically, Zapping Server reserves peers. Furthermore, this paper proposes three pre-reservation methods, time-driven, event-driven, and hybrid ones, in addition to the designs of system architecture and fast view video switching procedure. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated through computer simulation. As a result, we confirmed that the proposed system could provide fast view video switching service with a probability of about 94%.