System and method for receiver-driven streaming in a peer-to-peer network

• US 7,174,385 B2
• Filed: 09/28/2004
• Issued: 02/06/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 09/03/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Rovi Technologies Corporation (Adeia Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Li, Jin
• Primary Examiner(s): Najjar; Saleh
• Assistant Examiner(s): Korobov; V.
• Application Number:
  US10/951,482
• Publication Number:
  US 20060080454A1
• Time in Patent Office: 861 Days
• Field of Search: 709/231, 709/228, 709/238
• US Class Current: 709/231
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1101 Session protocols
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/612 for unicast
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/756 adapting media to device capabilities
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/764 at the destination reformatting of additional data in video clients H04N21/4355
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1001 for accessing one among a plurality of replicated servers
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1008 based on parameters of servers, e.g. available memory or workload monitoring of computer activity G06F11/30
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/101 based on network conditions
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1019 Random or heuristic server selection
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1029 using data related to the state of servers by a load balancer
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1038 Load balancing arrangements to avoid a single path through a load balancer
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/104 Peer-to-peer [P2P] networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1095 Replication or mirroring of data, e.g. scheduling or transport for data synchronisation between network nodes
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/14 Multichannel or multilink protocols

Abstract

A “PeerStreamer” provides receiver-driven peer-to-peer (P2P) media streaming for loosely coupled P2P networks. Peers in the network perform only simple operations, may cache all or part of the streaming media, do not collaborate with other peers, may be unreliable, and may drop offline or come online during any given streaming session. Clients in the network operate in real-time to coordinate peers, stream media from multiple peers, perform load balancing, handle online/offline states of peers, and perform decoding and rendering the streaming media. In one embodiment, the PeerStreamer uses high rate erasure resilient coding to allow multiple serving peers to hold partial media without conflict, such that clients simply retrieve fixed numbers of erasure coded blocks regardless of where and what specific blocks are retrieved. In another embodiment, the PeerStreamer uses embedded coded media to vary streaming bitrates according to available serving bandwidths and client queue status.

Claims

1. A computer-readable medium having computer executable instructions for providing client-driven streaming of multimedia data packets in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, said computer executable instructions comprising:

maintaining a plurality of client request queues on a client computer, each client request queue corresponding to one of a plurality of serving peers in a cluster of serving peers;

sending a client request of one or more data packets from the client computer to one or more of the serving peers;

wherein the client data packet requests to any serving peer are provided via a reliable and order preserving link to the serving peer, such that the serving peers do not need to identify the data packets sent in reply to the client requests;

adding each data packet request to the corresponding request queue when it is sent from the client to one of the serving peers,

removing each packet request from the corresponding request queue when the corresponding data packet is received by the client from the serving peer;

providing each received data packet to a common staging queue maintained by the client; and

assembling the data packets in the common staging queue into corresponding multimedia data packets.

2. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein maintaining a plurality of client request queues on a client computer further comprises creating and maintaining additional client request queues corresponding to any additional serving peers which subsequently join the cluster of serving peers.

3. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein maintaining a plurality of client request queues on a client computer further comprises moving any data packet requests remaining in a request queue corresponding to a serving peer dropped from the cluster of serving peers to one or more of the other client request queues.

4. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein load balancing is maintained across each of the serving peers in the cluster of serving peers by providing client management of data packet requests for maintaining an approximately consistent request fulfillment time (RFT) across each of the serving peers in the cluster of serving peers.

5. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein the reliable and order preserving link to the serving peer is a TCP communications protocol.

6. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein any incoming data packet received by the client from a serving peer corresponds to a first data packet request in the request queue corresponding to the serving peer from which the data packet was received.

7. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein client requests of particular data packets to particular serving peers is made based on a client analysis of availability vectors retrieved from each of the serving peers, and wherein the availability vector received from each serving peer defines at least available data packets stored on each corresponding serving peer.

8. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 further comprising decoding and rendering the assembled multimedia data packets on the client computer to provide to provide streaming media playback on the client computer.

9. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein the data packets are embedded coded data packets.

10. The computer-readable medium of claim 9 further comprising maintaining client control over a streaming bitrate of each embedded coded data packet by automatically limiting the client requests of one or more data packets to one or more of the serving peers as a function of:

an aggregate serving bandwidth of the serving peers;

a size of the common staging queue;

a desired request fulfillment time;

a length of received packets in the common staging queue;

a length of outstanding replies in each request queue; and

a base layer bitrate of the embedded coded data packets.