Managing Single and Multiple Publishers in a P2P Electronic Program Guide

Increasing bandwidth demand for online video streaming is posing challenges and opportunities for content delivery on the Internet. Studies show that Internet traffic for video delivery is increasing despite its quality being usually lower than television. Reasons for that include on demand behavior, community participation, possibility of interactivity, creation of content by users, and availability of media worldwide.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks offer the possibility of distributing bandwidth usage to reduce bandwidth bottleneck on source, besides making network more robust against occasional failures. Applications such as BitTorrent, SopCast, and Zattoo, are already a success on the field of P2P video distribution. However, P2P video streaming applications so far released have failed to capture social aspects, allowing very little interaction among users.

LiveShift is a P2P video streaming application developed by the CSG at the University of Zurich. The application, implemented in Java, supports both live streaming and video-on-demand in an integrated manner. While video is transmitted through the peer-to-peer network in a live fashion, all peers participate in a distributed storage. This adds the ability to replay time-shifted streams from other peers in a distributed and scalable manner.

LiveShift supports displaying an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for users to locate content easily. The EPG stores information about which programs and shows happened at which time and in which channel.

The work performed in this Bachelor Thesis will focus on security and collaboration on the LiveShift EPG information. At the moment, there is no security mechanism in place to guarantee the correctness of the EPG information. Besides, peers are not allowed to collaborate into building information on the EPG. This thesis has two main objectives. The first objective is to assure that certain objects of the EPG are provided only by the channel source. The second objective is to allow peers to collaborate, e.g., adding information, voting, adding comments into the EPG in a decentralized manner. These activities would form the basis of a decentralized and collaborative video stream database, much like IMDB.