Video Streaming in Peer-to-Peer Networks Using Network Coding Renders Efficient Video Cassette Recorder Operations

Problem statement: Major technological development in recent years has led to the usage of shared streaming solutions by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems in the Internet. Video streaming in P2P network systems has ample amount of loss of video packets due to network disabilities such as congestion, intrusion, connectivity problems, excessive network collisions etc. Adding onto the video streaming problems, Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) operations require flexibility of playback to the user. So, any missing or randomized packets from the video have to be instantaneously corrected and generated appropriately. Approach: In this paper, we study the working of VoD streaming system that uses Network Coding (NC) for improving the delivered video content at the end-user by correcting the error packets. We, study that NC not only, materializes uninterrupted playback but efficiency in VCR operations particularly, the seek operation have also improved the user perceived quality of videos. Our setup handles the NC generator present at the proxy between the media server and the peer clients, reducing the overhead at the server. The relevant packets that are lost within each peer-client are generated with the NC packets. Results: The receiver detects error due to loss of packets and corrects at a much faster pace than the time consumed for retransmission. This helps in improving user efficiency in VCR operations also. Though, NC provides added advantage in P2P VoD systems, there is initial transmission delay, a time cost incurred in video streaming. This time cost is rather small when compared to the difficulties within the Internet for the retransmissions. Conclusion: From the study we observe, that NC when applied to P2P VoD has few difficulties. They are complexity in implementing NC and tradeoffs on the part of NC in video streaming. Based on time and cache constraints these difficulties are not overwhelming when the actual benefits reaped are for a longer period of time.