Short-delay video streaming with restricted supplying peer bandwidth

With the growth of bandwidth, real-time video streaming service becomes popular. Such application is also considered a future killer application on Internet. Recent research efforts have demonstrated the promising potential of building cost-effective video streaming systems on top of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Since the peers have limited capacity, such as upstream bandwidth, each streaming session may involve multiple supplying peers. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to retrieve a long-duration video from multiple peers which have arbitrary and restricted upstream bandwidth, such that the waiting time is minimized. In comparison with the previous work [13], our strategy can greatly improve the waiting time. In the arbitrary given examples, our strategy can improve the waiting time by 67%. To take into account the popular compressed video with variable bit rate, we also show how to apply our strategy readily to the VBR videos.