The Peer To Peer Multipoint Video Conferencing

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Multipoint video conferencing is a real time visual communication for virtual meetings which can give users a new level of interactivity. Many types of networks such as mesh based structure which provides an information redundancy and more complicated content delivery scheme due to its complex structure. In order to overcome this problem, Multi-tree structure of peer-to-peer network is proposed to achieve full quality video for all the participants and to overcome the issue comes from heterogeneity of peers. Layered video has been a popular technique to enable access for video is used to solve the denying requests and allow each participant to view any other participants at any time.

Video conferencing is a rapidly growing reliable technology for connecting the people to communicate across the globe. Face-to-face interactions are now possible regardless of locations. It is widely used for multi-national companies with various branches across the world, education, commerce etc. Video conferencing is also a cost- effective solution by reducing the travel cost and time spent. The basic of video conferencing requires the environment, equipment and the network that links the sites together. The major feature of this multipoint video conferencing is to render the high quality video images at any capture resolution. The core concept used in video conferencing is digital compression in real time.

The major problem in video conferencing is quality degradation and bandwidth fluctuation among the participants. In point-to-point video conferencing, the quality degradation does not occur due to sufficient bandwidth, whereas in multipoint video conferencing this becomes a major problem. By using existing techniques and various types of networks, still there is minimum number of base quality receivers (half quality).

Peer-to-peer network is an alternative network model for multipoint video conferencing which provides better efficiency and fault tolerance. In this network, each peer plays the role of sender and receiver at the same time. That is, the peer can initiate requests to other peers and at the same time responds to incoming requests from other peers in the network.

Various video coding techniques are used. The advances in video coding [] explains the scalable video coding(SVC) consists of H.264/SVC, wavelet-based SVC, multiple description coding and high efficiency video coding.

Related Work

Since Akkus IE et al. [1] proposed a P2P multipoint video conferencing. They developed a fully distributed algorithm and multi-objective optimization framework for minimizing the number of base layer receivers, maximum delay experienced in a chain and to maximize the number of additional requests granted. Civanlar et al. [2] proposed a P2P multipoint video conferencing proto-type for a point-to-point video conferencing and it had extended to multipoint. They used an algorithm for two-stage heuristic to solve the asymmetric multipoint video conferencing problem. C.Xu et al. [3] proposed a balanced binary tree overlay network for exact queries and range queries. They derived algorithms for node joining and finding replacement.

D. Tran et al. [4] proposed a P2P technique called ZIGZAG and it allows the media server to distribute content to many clients with appropriate tree rooted at the server. End-to-end delay is also minimized. They used a star topology for forwarding the content. J.Liu et al. [6] proposed efficient algorithms to solve the optimal layering and bandwidth allocation problem using a simple two-step decomposition of intersession and intrasession optimization.

J.Liu et al. [7] described the basic taxonomy of P2P broadcast. They closely examined tree based and data driven overlay construction. Naeem R et al. [9] explained the overview and basics of P2P systems. The most recent trends in video coding are also explained. V. Venkataraman et al. [11] proposed an unstructured end system multicast protocol called Chunkyspread to incorporate different constraints and optimizations. Y. Liu et al [12] proposed a PRIME approach of mesh based P2P streaming for live content. They minimized the bandwidth bottleneck and content bottleneck by using packet scheduling. Y.W.Sung et al. [13] proposed the multi-tree framework and design heuristics to enable it to consider host contribution and operate in bandwidth-scarce environments. In [14] proposed a polynomial time approximation algorithm of weighted segment scheduling and demonstrated that outperforms other algorithms in terms of perceived video quality and in load balancing.

Proposed Work

System Architecture

Each participant in our multipoint video conferencing is termed as peer. In our Peer-to-peer network, each peer will send and receive the video. The sender peer captures the video from the capture device. The root sender peer act as a "Parent". The parent peer sends the video to multiple receivers directly. Then the process goes on level by level. The video is transmitted from sender to receiver by using the layered video and the proposed multi-tree structure.

For video transmission, the video content needs to be encoded. Then transmission takes place. At the receiver side, the received video is decoded and displayed. The video is stored simultaneously while it is displaying in the receiver peer. So that further video transmissions can take place.

C:\Users\admin\Desktop\sys1.jpgFigure1: Video Transmission Architecture

Layered Video

Layered video is partitioned of two layers such as base layer and enhancement layer. Receiving base layer only means half quality video is received. If both base layer and enhancement layer is received, then full quality will be achieved. The video CODEC- Coder and DECoder is used for encoding the video for compression before transmission and decoding the video for decompression before displaying the video. We are compressing the video in JPEG format.

Multi-Tree Structure

To achieve better quality for all the peers in the video conferencing and also to avoid the latency, multi-tree structure is proposed. The peers in the network are organized into a multi-tree structure with a relationship as "parent-child". The root parent peer initiates the video transmission to the multiple child peers as far as possible. Further those multiple child peers act as multiple parents to forth coming child peers and so on. This structure increases level by level.

For example, Let us consider a root parent peer having four child peers. The video transmission starts directly from the single root parent peer and it is received by these four child peers. Then these four child peers becomes a parent by transmitting the video content to the child peers in the next level as soon as they received the video.

C:\Users\admin\Desktop\Multi-tree.jpgFigure 2: Multi-Tree Structure for twenty participants in a peer-to-peer network

Results and Discussions

The multipoint video conferencing is deployed using a peer-to-peer network. All the peers act both as sender peer and receiver peer. Each peer send and receive the video in full quality at the same time.

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Figure 3: Video Receiving

The height, width and frames rate of the video can be customized. The video which is receiving stored simultaneously at the receiver side in order to forward that video to the corresponding receivers.

E:\vishnu I revw\s.jpg

Figure 4: Storing the video

The recording output is saved in an industry standard format (AVI) and the video file which is saving is also monitored simultaneously as in figure (5).

E:\vishnu I revw\save.jpg

Figure 5: Saving the video file

Conclusion

We proposed a peer-to-peer multipoint video conferencing using layered video and multi-tree structure. This approach makes possible to achieve full quality as well as better contribution among all the participants involved in the video conferencing. Heterogeneity of peers and quality degradation is avoided by using this proposed multi-tree structure. Time delay is also minimized by this approach.