On demand peer-to-peer video streaming with multiple description coding

For use in a peer-to-peer video serving network including a plurality of peer nodes, each peer node being capable of acting as at least one of a client peer and a server peer, a computer-implemented method comprising:

• accepting and storing peer information of the peer-to-peer video serving network;
• accepting a video file for serving to a requesting client peer of the peer-to-peer video serving network;
• provisioning server peers of the peer-to-peer video serving network to serve sub-streams of the video file;
• accepting a request for the movie from a client peer of the peer-to-peer video serving network;
• identifying server peers provisioned to serve sub-streams of the video file;
• establishing a peer-to-peer session between the requesting client peer and the identified server peers;
• wherein at least a subset of the identified server peers-transmit a sub-stream of the video file to the requesting client peer;
• wherein the requesting client peer receives the served sub-streams;
• assembles a video from the received served sub-streams;
• and stores or renders the assembled video wherein at least one alternative server peer transmits a sub-stream of the video file to the requesting client peer after a determination that the assembled video quality is not acceptable based on an acceptance probability of a video session subject to the video session meeting a distortion constraint and a bandwidth over a transport network between the client and the server.

A management facility for use in a peer-to-peer video serving network, the network comprising a plurality of peer nodes, each peer node being capable of acting as at least one of a client peer and a server peer, the management facility comprising:

• a computing device comprising a processing unit,
• a memory coupled to said computing device, the memory having stored thereon:
• a set of computer executable instructions configured to cause the computing device determine video sub-streams for a video and server peers on which to store the video sub-streams using both a distortion constraint by determining an acceptance probability of a video session subject to the video session meeting the distortion constraint and information of available server peers wherein the information of available server peers includes an uplink bandwidth between each of the server peers and a transport network portion of the peer-to-peer video streaming network;
• and
• a set of computer executable instructions configured to cause the computing device to transmit the determined video sub-streams to the server peers on which it was determined to store the video sub-streams to provision them to serve sub-streams of the video file.