Investigation of Playback Policies for P2P Live and On-Demand Video Streaming

LiveShift is a peer-to-peer video streaming application developed by the CSG group at the University of Zurich. The application 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.

P2P environments have special characteristics that makes video streaming very challenging. Since it provides no strong guarantees, it is often the case that the video data that needs to be played has not been downloaded yet. It may be the case that some attempts to download it have failed, since other peers may fail or disconnect at eny time, or even that the data is not available anymore on all online peers. In this case, the software needs to make a decision on whether to stall playback and wait for the block to arrive or to skip to the next block. This decision is called the playback policy.

This Assignment (Vertiefungsarbeit, VA) shall investigate about play policies for the LiveShift application. The student shall learn about factors that positively influence user experience and derive one or more possible play policies. After that, the student shall implement the set of defined play policies and measure their effect concerning quality of experience (QoE) for the end user.