While the demand for video streaming services has risen rapidly in recent years, supporting video streaming service to a large number of receivers still remains a challenging task due to the scalability, reliability and flexibility issues. On approaching this problem, the innovative peer-to-peer networking has recently been proposed which effectively addresses all those concerns....[ Read more ]

While the demand for video streaming services has risen rapidly in recent years, supporting video streaming service to a large number of receivers still remains a challenging task due to the scalability, reliability and flexibility issues. On approaching this problem, the innovative peer-to-peer networking has recently been proposed which effectively addresses all those concerns.

In this thesis, we examine and compare the major approaches used so far on large scale peer-to-peer video streaming, and consider the problems as a general framework of overlay resource allocation, which comprises of the bandwidth allocation and content allocation. Invoking this framework, we propose appropriate designs on the three most popular video delivery services, namely live video broadcasting, Video on Demand and large volume video file distribution.

Firstly, we introduce an integrated and optimized live streaming system to provide the best quality live video broadcasting to a large scale network. In our proposal, using the topology formation and tree formation, we construct a multiple-tree based overlay network with the maximal throughput and full bandwidth utilization. Meanwhile, based on the downloading rate of users, our proposed system adaptively controls the video playback rate so as to provide users with the best visual quality given the limited available bandwidth.

Regarding to the Video on Demand service, we propose a novel stochastic segment downloading scheme to enable real-VoD service with the full VCR support. The proposed algorithm makes use of the heterogeneous buffer storage and downloading rates of peers to effectively facilitate the overlay query relay.

Finally, via extensive simulations, we study the performance of Rarest First schemes and Choking algorithms of BitTorrent, a prevailing video file downloading software. With the simulation study, we further propose a simple and light-weight scheme to enhance the Rarest First scheme of BitTorrent by making use of the Digital Fountain codes.