Recent advances in peer-to-peer video streaming by using scalable video coding

Scalable Video Coding provides important functionalities, such as the spatial, temporal, and SNR (quality) scalability, thereby significantly improving coding efficiency over prior standards such as the H.264/AVC and enabling the power adaptation. In turn, these functionalities lead to the enhancement of the video streaming over Peer-to-Peer networks, thereby providing a powerful platform for a variety of multimedia streaming applications, such as video-on-demand, video conferencing, live broadcasting, and many others. P2P systems are considered to be extremely cost-effective, since they utilize resources of the peer machines (e.g., CPU resources, memory resources, and bandwidth). However, since bandwidth is usually not constant and also since Peer-to-Peer networks suffer from the packet loss, there is no guarantee for the end-user video presentation quality. In addition, due to different server and end-user hardware configurations, it will be useful to specify the quality of the media (e.g., the bit-rate, spatial/ temporal resolution, and the like). As a result, the Scalable Video Coding approach is an excellent choice, since the media streaming can be adjusted to a suitable stream to fit a particular Peer-to-Peer network and particular end-user requirements.