Abstract
With the progress of network technology, requirements for applications of multimedia streaming via Internet are also increased. The effective transmission of real time multimedia has become an important issue. In this thesis, a P2P-based multimedia system is proposed to provide a scalable, robust and reliable live streaming service. Based on the concept of Application Layer Multicast (ALM), a tree like structure is designed to connect the peers, and the peers receive streaming data from each other instead of the streaming provider to reduce the loading and network traffic of the server. Hence, a high available streaming service can be achieved even a large number of users are receiving the same service. Some mechanisms are also proposed to prevent the system be effected by the frequently join and departure of upstream peers due to the native of a tree structure. In addition to receive the service provided by others, users can even treat themselves as a streaming provider, to provide their own live streaming contents to all others in the system easily. The proposed system also works well for those users behind NAT (Network Address Translation) and firewall. Thus, users can easily share their own contents by our system, or access the interested streaming contents provided by others in our system via Internet.