A Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming System Based on the iVCE Platform

With the advancement of peer-to-peer technology, media streaming applications become more and more popular in the Internet. However, the traditional development methods for this kind of applications need developers not only to consider the application logic but also to manage the dynamics of Internet resources, thus increasing the difficulty of development and limiting the deployment of personal video distribution applications. In this paper, we design and implement a peer-to-peer streaming system in a much easier way. In this way we can concentrate on the application itself without distraction from the dynamics of Internet resources. Such simplification owes to the Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment (iVCE), which provides programming abstractions and runtime utilities that can encapsulate the complexity of managing transient resources into the platform, thus facilitating the construction of Internet applications. When we build our streaming application based on the iVCE, we only need to define the interaction protocols among distributed nodes with the Owlet programming language. Also, we implement a JavaBean, which can be used by the Owlet program, to assist the transferring and rendering of the content. Our implementation shows that peer-to-peer applications such as media streaming, can be elegantly built using the iVCE platform, and it can serve as a reference implementation for developing similar applications.