An adaptive anchor protocol to enable VCR interactions for P2P VoD streaming service

Abstract

User interactivity support is one of the most critical challenges that today's P2P streaming service is facing to be able to provide a satisfying user experience. This paper presents a popularity-aware video prefetching scheme as a viable solution to support improved interactive functionality for P2P VoD streaming service. Our proposal of a predictive prefetching protocol is capable of tracking chunk popularity varying over video areas, based on which chunk prefetching priority is determined; popular chunks are to be downloaded ahead of less popular ones. The proposed protocol significantly reduces video seeking latency compared to existing approaches, which leads to enhanced streaming performance. Our performance study confirms that the proposed scheme excels in terms of user interactivity as well as streaming quality.