A Model for Error Avoidance and Error Correction in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Video streaming over best effort networks remains a challenging task. Video quality decreases with the number of frames that are corrupted, lost or received after the playback time. In order to deliver videos in high quality, a model for selecting the proper network-error treatment in a peer-to-peer overlay is presented. Based on the model, the selection is between error avoidance, error correction and a combination of both approaches. The model is evaluated by using the network simulator NS-2 and a modified version of EvalVid. The solution is presented in the context of an indexing-cache overlay, which has two interesting properties for our selection model: it efficiently locates even rare videos, and the search procedure returns multiple locations for a requested video.