Evaluating MDC with incentives in P2PTV systems

Abstract

The popularity of P2P video streaming is raising the interest of broadcasters, operators and service providers. Concretely, mesh-pull based P2P systems are the most extended ones. Despite these systems address scalability efficiently, they still present limitations that difficult them to offer the same user experience in comparison with traditional TV. These ones are mainly the freeriding effect, long start-up delays and the impact of churn and bandwidth heterogeneity. In this paper we study the performance of Multiple Description Coding (MDC) combined with the use of incentives for redistribution in order to mitigate some of them by means of simulations. Simulation results show that the use of MDC and incentive-based scheduling strategies improve the overall performance of the system. Moreover, an extended version of the P2PTVSim simulator has been developed to support MDC and incentives.