Abstract-In recent literature, network coding has emerged as a promising information theoretic approach to improve the performance of both peer-to-peer and wireless networks. It has been widely accepted and acknowledged that network coding can theoretically improve network throughput of multicast sessions in directed acyclic graphs, achieving their cut-set capacity bounds. Recent studies have also supported the claim that network coding is beneficial for large-scale peer-to-peer content distribution, as it solves the problem of locating the last missing blocks to complete the download. We seek to perform a reality check of using network coding for peer-to-peer live multimedia streaming. We start with the following critical question: How helpful is network coding in peerto-peer streaming? To address this question, we first implement the decoding process using Gauss-Jordan elimination, such that it can be performed while coded blocks are progressively received. We then implement a realistic testbed, called Lava, with actual network traffic to meticulously evaluate the benefits and tradeoffs involved in using network coding in peer-to-peer streaming. We present the architectural design challenges in implementing network coding for the purpose of streaming, along with a pullbased peer-to-peer live streaming protocol in our comparison studies. Our experimental results show that network coding makes it possible to perform streaming with a finer granularity, which reduces the redundancy of bandwidth usage, improves resilience to network dynamics, and is most instrumental when the bandwidth supply barely meets the streaming demand.
The benefit of network coding with peer-to-peer networks has been evaluated in REF , which shows that network coding is very useful in peer-to-peer networks, since it provides granularity and resiliency to network dynamics and leads to better bandwidth usage.
Lava: A Reality Check of Network Coding in Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming
IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
Computer Science