Overlay Multi-hop FEC Scheme for Point-to-Point Video Streaming over Peer-to-Peer Networks

In this paper, we focus on the problem of providing lightweight support at selected intermediate overlay forwarding nodes to achieve increased error resilience on a single peer-based overlay path for point-to-point video streaming. We propose a novel "Overlay Multi-hop FEC" (OMFEC) scheme that is flexible and considers the error characteristics of each overlay hop. We partition the end-to-end overlay path into segments and provide error resilience over those segments. Architecturally, this flexible design lies between the end-to-end and hop-by-hop paradigms, and we argue that it is well suited to peer-based overlay networks. We evaluate our work by both simulations and real-world implementation using a real video streaming application. These evaluations show that OM-FEC outperforms a pure end-to-end strategy by 1015 dB in terms of video PSNR, and can be much more efficient than a heavyweight hop-by-hop resilience strategy.