Description:
Media application on the internet has become more and more popular as the bandwidth of
the network links increase. The bottleneck of the existing media systems is no longer the
link bandwidth at user’s end, but the server’s ability to handle streaming requests. These
existing streaming systems do not scale up to a large number of users. Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
architecture allows the system to scale up to a large number of users by using the peer to
help forward data. However, because the peers in a P2P system participate in the data
forwarding process, the performance of the P2P system depends on the reliability and
robustness of the peers. We propose a hybrid P2P topology that is efficient in both
bandwidth utilization and scalability. This paper describes the construction and the
algorithm design of our proposed data dissemination scheme. In order to achieve
reliability and robustness requirements of real-time media applications, we implemented
Forward Error Correction (FEC) which substantially improves the packet loss rate at the
peer’s end. The system can be scaled up to a large number of users and is capable of
disseminating high-quality media (audio and video) stream.