Probabilistic prefetching scheme for P2P VoD applications with frequent seeks

In peer-to-peer video-on-demand (P2P VoD) applications, users tend to seek to the positions that they are interested in. The frequent seeks raise a great challenge to the design of the prefetching scheme. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic prefetching framework to reduce the seeking distance. Each peer performs prefetching based on the segment access probability, which is estimated from the seeking statistics in the previous sessions. It is a challenging task to collect the seeking statistics in a distributed P2P network. In the proposed framework, we employ FM sketches to represent the seeking statistics, thus greatly reducing the space and time complexity. The simulation results show that the proposed prefetching scheme can approach closer to the desired seeking positions compared to the prefetching scheme neglecting the user viewing pattern.