Streaming to mobile users in a peer-to-peer network

Streaming video to mobile users is rapidly emerging as a crucial multimedia service. One of the stumbling blocks in mobile streaming is the heterogeneity found in mobile devices: diverse display size, computing power, memory, and media capabilities. Given this heterogeneity, video transcoding is often required to satisfy the requirements of different mobile users. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) method for mobile streaming. In the proposed method, peers other than mobile users, called fixed nodes, contribute their computing power for transcoding. We further propose the interleaved distributed transcoding (IDT) scheme that allows multiple fixed nodes to perform transcoding for a mobile device. Distributed transcoding not only lowers computation at fixed nodes, but also achieves error resilience against packet loss. The IDT scheme conforms to the H.264/AVC baseline profile, which requires no modification to decoders found in many mobile phones. We analyzed the effect of distributed transcoding under peer churn. Extensive simulations show that mobile streaming based on the proposed scheme is robust to packet loss due to peer churn and adverse wireless channel conditions.