We describe a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network that is designed to support Video on Demand (VoD) services. This network is based on a video-file sharing mechanism that classifies peers according to the window (segment of the file) that they are downloading. This classification easily allows identifying peers that are able to share windows among them, so one of our major contributions is the definition of a mechanism that could be implemented to efficiently distribute video content in future 5G networks. Considering that cooperation among peers can be insufficient to guarantee an appropriate system performance, we also propose that this network must be assisted by upload bandwidth from servers; since these resources represent an extra cost to the service provider, especially in mobile networks, we complement our work by defining a scheme that efficiently allocates them only to those peers that are in windows with resources scarcity (we called it prioritized windows distribution scheme). On the basis of a fluid model and a Markov chain, we also developed a methodology that allows us to select the system parameters values (e.g., windows sizes or minimum servers upload bandwidth) that satisfy a set of Quality of Experience (QoE) parameters.
Guest editorial special issue on quality of experience for multimedia applications