Location-proximity-based clustering method for peer-to-peer multimedia streaming services with multiple sources

Social distancing to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) made a huge increase in the global OTT market, and OTT service providers get millions of new subscribers. Recently OTT service providers are extending their service to video broadcasting. As a one type of video broadcasting, this paper covers multimedia streaming with multiple sources. Multimedia streaming with multiple sources has multiple sources, and receivers can select one specific source to watch the video from the source. Sources include cameras capturing different angles of same event or location, cameras in geographical locations, etc. For delivering video to rapidly increasing number of users, multimedia streaming with multiple sources system needs efficient and scalable delivery method. Tree-based Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has been investigated as the delivery solution of multimedia streaming with multiple sources, and set-top boxes or mobile apps of OTT service can be used as peers connecting the subscriber of OTT service. However, the scalability of the tree-based P2P networking is limited by the out-degree of a tree that branches linearly with the number of users. Hence, this study proposes clustering peers based on the location proximity of the peers to enhance the scalability of the P2P multimedia streaming with multiple sources. By clustering peers, one or more peers can be grouped into a virtual peer with an aggregated uplink/downlink capacity. This paper describes P2P multimedia streaming with multiple sources and algorithms for the proposed clustering method. Two applications which are one-view multiparty video conferencing and multi-view video streaming are introduced, and considerations for applying the proposed method to the applications are also discussed. The experimental results show that location-proximity-based clustering is effective in achieving a scalable P2P multimedia streaming with multiple sources by reducing the out-degree of a tree for the introduced applications. The proposed clustering leads improvement in the maximum achievable video bit rate, the average viewing video bit rate, and perceived delay.