Peer Assisted Live Video Streaming in Web Browsers using WebRTC

Sammanfattning: This thesis presents a solution for peer assisted live video streaming in web browsers. The motivation behind the solution is that content providers, which need to allocate large amounts of server resources and bandwidth to support their services, could benefit from letting their viewers assist in distributing the video. Essential to this is the fact that live video streaming typically have relaxed time constraints, i.e. there is often a buffer of tens of seconds to allow for a smooth playback. The peer assistance is done with peer-to-peer connections that is natively supported in WebRTC-enabled web browsers. Peers cooperate by downloading different segments from the server and subsequently sharing this between themselves. For efficient utilization of the network, peers do also have a notion of the network topology and choose to cooperate with nearby peers. It is shown that server resources and bandwidth can be reduced by enabling peer assistance for suitable peers.