P2P group communication using scalable video coding

P2P-streaming has become of high interest in the last years, since it reduces the load on expensive servers, due to the participation of receivers in the media transmission. In this paper, P2P content delivery is shown to be a promising technique for video group communication, for which the main requirement is low-delay. Combining low-delay encoding and low-delay P2P Application Layer Multicast makes it possible to fulfill the delay constraints for interactive group communication applications. For such an application, congestion is a considerable problem, since it causes packet loss or late arrival of the packets, degrading the quality of the service. The results presented in this paper show how rate adaptation in combination with the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) helps to overcome problems in the network, providing a better solution than when non-adaptive single layer coding is transmitted.