Peer-to-Peer Live Video Streaming with Distributed Time-Shifting (LiveShift)

LiveShift is a peer-to-peer video streaming application being developed by the CSG group at the University of Zurich. The objective is to support both live streaming and video-on-demand in an integrated manner. While video is transmitted through the peer-to-peer network in a live fashion, all peers participate in a distributed storage. This adds the ability to replay time-shifted streams from other peers in a distributed and scalable manner.

Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming

• Vast, user-generated content
• Anonymity, no censorship
• Lower distribution price, potentially free
• Scalable, fault-tolerant, load-balanced
• Avoids redundant traffic
• Peers collaborate in a distributed storage: much more available storage space
• No need to record all programs
• Accessible from any IP-capable device

Time Shift with Distributed Storage

• Ability to watch streams that happened in the pas
• Useful for both pausing live video and continuing later as well as to watch past stream
• Enables combination of Video-on-Demand (VoD) and live streaming in a single application
  
• Generally limited by local storage space

Mesh-Pull Stream Distribution

• Video stream is divided into substreams
• Each substream is created using a Scalable Video Codec (SVC)
• Substreams are divided into 1 second blocks
• Blocks are exchanged among peers with no fixed structure

Fully Distributed Tracker

• Distributed Hash Table (DHT) used to store channel list and individual channel information
• Distributed Tracker (DT) collaboratively composed by peers in the system
• Balances load
• Increases robustness

Time-Shifted Streaming

• When watching, peers selectively store blocks locally
• Peers announce availability on DT
• Peers also exchange fine-grained availability information with close neighbors

Publications

Fabio V. Hecht, Thomas Bocek, Richard G. Clegg, Raul Landa, David Hausheer, Burkhard Stiller, LiveShift: Mesh-Pull Live and Time-Shifted P2P Video Streaming. To appear in the 36th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2011), IEEE Computer Society, October 2011.

Fabio V. Hecht, Thomas Bocek, Burkhard Stiller , B-Tracker: Improving Load Balancing and Efficiency in Distributed P2P Trackers. To Appear on Eleventh IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (IEEE P2P'11), IEEE, August 2011.

Fabio Hecht, Thomas Bocek, Burkhard Stiller, B-Tracker: improving load balancing and efficiency in distributed P2P trackers. IFI Technical Report, University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, April 2011.

Fabio Victora Hecht, Thomas Bocek, Cristian Morariu, David Hausheer, Burkhard Stiller: LiveShift: Peer-to-peer Live Streaming with Distributed Time-Shifting. Eighth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P08), Demo Session, Aachen, Germany, September 2008.

Thomas Bocek, Yehia El-khatib, Fabio Victora Hecht, David Hausheer, Burkhard Stiller: Demonstration of the CompactPSH Incentive Scheme in a Peer-to-Peer Streaming Application. 34th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2009), Demo Paper, Zurich, Switzerland, October 2009.

Fabio Victora Hecht, Burkhard Stiller: Report- and Reciprocity-based Incentive Mechanisms for Live and On-demand P2P Video Streaming. Proceedings of AIMS 2010, Springer LNCS 6155, Zurich, Switzerland, June 2010.

Fabio Hecht, Thomas Bocek, Richard G. Clegg, Raul Landa, David Hausheer, Burkhard Stiller:LiveShift: Mesh-Pull P2P Live and Time-Shifted Video Streaming. IFI Technical Report, University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, No. 2010.IFI-2010.0009, Zurich, Switzerland, September 2010.

UZH Personnel

• Prof. Burkhard Stiller
• Dr. David Hausheer
• Dr. Thomas Bocek
• Cristian Morariu
• Fabio Hecht

Contact

Inquiries may be directed to the local Swiss project management:

Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller
University of Zürich, IFI
Binzmühlestrasse 14
CH-8050 Zürich
Switzerland
E-Mail: stiller@ifi.uzh.ch
Phone: +41 44 635 67 10
Fax: +41 44 635 68 09