Pervasive streaming via peer-to-peer networks

Media streaming is an essential element of many applications, including the emerging area of mobile systems and services. Internet broadcasting, conferencing, video-on-demand, online gaming, and a variety of other time-constrained applications are gaining significant momentum. Yet, streaming in a pervasive environment is not mature enough to address challenges such as scalability, heterogeneity, and latency. In a client-server system, streaming servers introduce computational and network bottlenecks affecting the scalability of the system and mobile client exhibit intermittent behavior and high-latency connections. This chapter explores ways that several proposed peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems deploy to address some of these challenges. An initial introduction on P2P network fundamentals and classifications provides the necessary background information to focus on and assimilate the different mechanisms that enable scalable and resilient streaming in a pervasive environment. The most interesting developments are presented in an accessible way by revisiting the features of common P2P streaming applications. This approach helps in identifying a range of burning research issues that are still undergoing investigation.