Can streaming of stored playback video be supported on peer to peer infrastructure?

Streaming live video over peers in the Internet is gaining popularity since it has the advantage of reducing the load on the server and enable the server to perform other specialized services more effectively. It also helps reduce the server bandwidth and is therefore no more a limiting factor for the number of clients served. We propose a architecture for ´streaming stored video´ over peer-to-peer network. While a given peer continues to receive segments of the stream, simultaneously caching these segments locally renders this peer to inturn act as a source for other peers. These peers are highly transient in nature and the exit of a peer from the network results in loss of video segments. We overcome this in our architecture by exploiting the inherent redundancy of FEC encoding of video streams. Through simulations we establish the novelty of our architecture and show that our proposed solution incurs minimum overhead on the peers and does not increase the playback latency much more than the jitter buffer latency.