Motivation

There is nowadays an increasing growth of multimedia systems present in the Internet. This is a consequence of the development of broadband accesses in residential users, together with the opening of content producers to new business models. These systems have many different architectures, depending on their sizes and on the popularity of their contents. The majority of them have a traditional Content Delivery Network (CDN) structure (for instance, the case of msnTV, YouTube, Jumptv, etc.), while new proposals try to share the distribution of the video with the servers through the present mature Peer to Peer (P2P) systems (for instance, the case of Joost, iMP, etc.).

P2P are virtual networks developed at the application level over the Internet infrastructure. The nodes in the network, called peers, offer their resources (bandwidth, processing power, storing capacity) to the other nodes, basically because they all share common interests. As a consequence, as the number of customers increases, the same happens with the global resources of the P2P network. P2P networks are becoming more and more popular today and are very used for file sharing and distribution; some known examples are Bittorrent, KaZaA, eMule, etc.

GOLP2P is a peer to peer distribution system, capable of distributing high-bandwidth content to all network peers preserving its quality. This project follows the multi-source approach where the stream is decomposed into several flows sent by different peers to each client. In order to meassure the peers perceived quality, it is used the recently proposed PSQA technology.