Abstract
In this research report we propose a self-organizing media streaming solution that supports multiple interacting participants as well as a large number of observers. This solution is aimed at a number of emerging multimedia applications over the Internet, such as distributed discussion panels, that require users to interact by exchanging live media content. Keeping
the end-to-end latency as low as possible while not violating the bandwidth constraints of all participants is one of the most important requirements for this type of application. While there exists some solutions to the above problem for applications such as multi-party video streaming, they rely on dedicated infrastructures which may be expensive and not available to all users. On the other hand, decentralized P2P solutions have been focusing on single source media streaming applications, such as video-on-demand, which does not consider multiple interactive participants. We present a preliminary evaluation of our solution with simulations implemented using Peersim peer-to-peer simulator and also ns-3 network simulator. The evaluation results show that the system can achieve low end-to-end latencies and scales well with the number of streams.