A new mechanism to improve video streaming in P2P networks using helpernodes

Abstract

Peer-to-peer video on demand (P2P-VoD) is a solution to provide video service to a large number of users onthe Internet. Due to the upload bandwidth bottleneck of VoD servers, the streaming capacity in the P2P-VoD systemis limited. This paper proposes a new mechanism to improve the video streaming in P2P networks by using the idlepeers upload bandwidth and storage, which are called helpers. The proposed method uses an XOR mechanism in theVoD server to encode chunks and reduce bandwidth use. The helpers receive encoded chunks from the VoD server andsave them in their storage spaces and cooperate in sharing these chunks with the other peers. Simulation results usingOMNET++ are provided to show the efficiency of the proposed mechanism in terms of the required upload capacityrequirement of the server and deploying the storage and bandwidth of helpers. The results of simulation show that theupload bandwidth usage of the server has been reduced. On the other hand, the proposed method increases the memoryusage of helpers.