Title: MVP2P: Layer-Dependency-Aware Live MVC Video Streaming over Peer-to-Peer Networks,
Abstract: Multiview video supports observing a scene from different viewpoints. The
Joint Video Team (JVT) developed H.264/MVC to enhance the compression
efficiency for multiview video, however, MVC encoded multiview video (MVC
video) still requires high bitrates for transmission. This paper investigates
live MVC video streaming over Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The goal is to
minimize the server bandwidth costs whist ensuring high streaming quality to
peers. MVC employs intra-view and inter-view prediction structures, which leads
to a complicated layer dependency relationship. As the peers' outbound
bandwidth is shared while supplying all the MVC video layers, the bandwidth
allocation to one MVC layer affects the available outbound bandwidth of the
other layers. To optimise the utilisation of the peers' outbound bandwidth for
providing video layers, a maximum flow based model is proposed which considers
the MVC video layer dependency and the layer supplying relationship between
peers. Based on the model, a layer dependency aware live MVC video streaming
method over a BitTorrent-like P2P network is proposed, named MVP2P. The key
components of MVP2P include a chunk scheduling strategy and a peer selection
strategy for receiving peers, and a bandwidth scheduling algorithm for
supplying peers. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed solution, MVP2P is
compared with existing methods considering the constraints of peer bandwidth,
peer numbers, view switching rates, and peer churns. The test results show that
MVP2P significantly outperforms the existing methods.