Kangaroo: video seeking in P2P systems

A key challenge faced by peer-to-peer (P2P) video-ondemand (VoD) systems is their ability, or lack thereof, to provide DVD-like functionality, such as pause, forward and backward seeking (or jumps). Such operations can significantly degrade the performance of a P2P system as arbitrary video segments may need to be served timely on demand. Currently, little is known of the impact that these operations can have on the swarm efficiency, user experience and server load. In this paper, we design and implement a novel P2P system called Kangaroo, which supports DVD-like jumps. Using a carefully designed peer topology management, hybrid block scheduling algorithms, and a smart tracker, Kangaroo provides low buffering times and high swarming throughput under jump operations, without the need for overly provisioned peers or server. We experimentally evaluate the performance of the system using live VoD traces captured from a large commercial IPTV network.