In the last decades, Internet video contents have been witnessing a very rapid expansion. This fact has incrementally undermined the usage of Client/Server (C/S) communication mode, in which the server may not support the huge loads, leading to a bad video quality. One solution could be to simply replicate and relocate the content within a new server as done within Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Another solution is to use a pure P2P architecture to distribute the content among peers in a load balancing manner. However, in order to provide an efficient scalable content delivery service, neither a C/S-based, nor a P2P-based architecture can reach the target alone. The centralized server of C/S architecture requires high accessibility features that may not be easily and cheaply provided. On the other hand, P2P architecture needs a sufficient number of ’seeders’ (content sources) to guarantee the content arrival. In this scope, the project P2PWeb proposed to mix the centralized architecture provided by C/S protocols with the efficient load balanced repartition of P2P networks. The video delivery starts in a C/S mode. Then, at a given clients’ number threshold at which the server becomes saturated, it changes the delivery to P2P mode among the current clients that potentially accept to share their downloaded chunks.

The main objective of this internship is to study the efficiency of the proposed P2PWeb hybrid architecture compared to a pure C/S architecture for video delivery in term of Quality of service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). We will mainly concentrate on the delivery of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which is the scalable extension of the H.264/AVC standard. SVC appears as a flexible relevant solution for video flow repartitioning in the context of P2PWeb architecture, since it helps to deliver the same video to different heterogeneous users at the same time.

QoS and QoE evaluations will be done in a simulation environment and also in a virtual experimental environment. Finally, they will be applied in a real context over an academically experimental P2P network.

This internship will be done in the context of a collaborative project between IVC, LINA and two regional PME. The stagier will contribute and interact in the project meetings.

Location : IRCCyN/IVC, Polytech Nantes Salary : 417 € (tax free) Beginning : Asap