PeerTV

The PeerTV project is defined to develop, deploy and validate peer-to-peer media streaming platforms that address three key requirments not currently met by existing broadband infrastructures: (i) efficient utilization of upload bandwidth available at peers to reduce the amount of bandwidth that needs to be centrally provisioned and paid for by TV broadcasters; (ii) reducing the playback latency and increasing the playback continuity of video, through constructing novel topologies; and (iii) minimizing the amount (and cost) of network traffic for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) through building an autonomous-system infrastructure aware.

We tackle these problems using techniques from peer-to-peer overlay networks and optimization theory. Our peer-to-peer software infrastructures adapts to the changes of environment at runtime to meet the above optimization objectives.

The following systems are implemented in this project:

• Forestcast: A centralized solution that uses a heuristics approach to building a multiple-tree structure for live media streaming.
• GradienTv: A market-based solution for live media streaming over the Gradient overlay.
• TuxStream: A push-pull solution for live media streaming.
• GVoD: P2P VoD using the Gradient Overlay Network.