Abstract
Peer-to-peer (P2P) video-on-demand (VoD) is increasingly popular with Internet users. Many P2P VoD systems have been proposed. Some of them can support VCR operations, such as fast forward and jumping to arbitrary playback points, but they require very well provisioned source servers to guarantee the quality. The challenge is to do the same without requiring well provisioned source servers. Most previous works tackle the quality issue by replicating the blocks of the video uniformly in the overlay to reduce the dependence on the source servers. However, ensuring the number of replicas per blocks is not enough, since the bandwidth of peers in the P2P network is often heterogeneous. In this thesis, we take the heterogeneity of bandwidth into consideration, and also consider the practical case in which the capacity of the streaming buffer is limited. With these conditions, we formulate the problem as a bandwidth utilization optimization problem. We first prove that this problem is NP-hard and then propose an optimal dynamic programming solution. Finally, we introduce a distributed heuristic to solve this problem practically.