A Reliable Chunkless Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Multimedia Streaming

In this paper we propose a chunkless structure for multimedia distribution over peer-to-peer networks. With the proposed approach, the original multimedia packets are partitioned into several reduced packets whose transmission requires a fraction 1/R of the bandwidth required by the original data. The generation of the reduced packets depends on a random seed that can be randomly chosen by each node. The reconstruction of the original packet is possible as soon as R reduced packets are received from the other peers. The proposed scheme has a very small computational complexity, it is transparent to cryptography and it is independent on the used multimedia signal coding scheme. Analytical expressions of the start-up time and the probability of information recovery are obtained.