Underlying Technology of P2P Media Streaming

For its bright prospect, P2P media streaming technology has been gaining increasing attention during the past decades. In contrast with the centralized applications, P2P media streaming applications are more effective in low-cost and high scalability. Nevertheless, it is still a tough and challenging work to guarantee high QoS (Quality of Service). To begin with, the basic concepts of P2P media steaming are introduced, including its research objectives, major problems, critical techniques and the related architecture. Then, the involved techniques, ranges from the transmission and optimization for P2P media streaming, data processing and data security for P2P media streaming, which will limit various performances of media streaming are analyzed and discussed. Meanwhile, the pros and cons of these techniques are scrutinized. Finally, the future researches are outlined in this field.