Differentiated chunk scheduling for P2P Video-on-Demand system

The peer-to-peer (P2P) networks provides a data distribution model that is attractive for Video on Demand (VoD) as it allows to decrease the costs and increase the scalability of video distribution. The two significant challenges in P2P VoD streaming are scalability and video quality. Both require efficient utilization of the resources in P2P network. Inspired by this finding, the paper addresses the problems of chunk scheduling and bandwidth allocation in P2P VoD system to efficiently utilize the upload bandwidth capacity of the peers. We first propose a queue based chunk scheduling mechanism followed by a bandwidth distribution algorithm for urgent downloading and prefetching. Our proposed mechanism allows the maximum utilization of upload bandwidth by distributing the available upload bandwidth among different queues. Experimental results show that differentiated queuing is capable of achieving the optimal streaming rate.