A peer-to-peer architecture for on-demand video streaming on Internet

A new peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture is developed for streaming stored video on the Internet. In the proposed media streaming architecture, a P2P forwarding chain is constructed. To maintain continuous playback at the peer, a standby FEC server is maintained to provide the FEC coded media stream to peers when their buffered content is almost exhausted. A parent-child exchange (PCX) routing mechanism is proposed to adjust the P2P chain. Our simulation results show that the PCX scheme can greatly improve the system performance and make efficient use of peers´ bandwidth. It is also shown that the backup FEC data support from the server can reduce the number of stalled playbacks at the peers with a reasonable cost.