Toward a full peer to peer MPEG-DASH compliant streaming system

Abstract

MPEG-DASH standard has been proposed to standardize the proprietary solutions proposed to stream multi-qualities encoded video/audio over HTTP. Although MPEG-DASH relies on the client/server communication model, in this paper we show that it could be also used in a full P2P streaming system after making the necessary changes in the MPEG-DASH standard as well as in the main modules of the P2P streaming system. The main changes are made in the Media Presentation Description (MPD) file to support the P2P network bootstrapping mechanism (peers selection algorithm) as well as in the pieces selection algorithm to make the peer quality adaptation enabled as imposed by the MPEG-DASH. We choose the famous BitTorrent protocol as an example to implement the required changes. Extensive simulations have been conducted under the OMNeT + + simulator. The obtained results in terms of the average missed segments and the average waiting time on playback are reasonable with regards to 1) the BitTorrent known issue in the streaming context, to 2) the hard conditions we considered in our simulation set-up and 3) compared to some representative related works. This results show that MPEG-DASH could be easily supported by P2P streaming systems.