Seacast: A protocol for peer-to-peer video streaming supporting multiple description coding

SEACAST is a peer-to-peer live streaming protocol developed at Politecnico di Torino, which aims at improving current systems in two key areas. The first is the use of full-fledged flow control using RTP/UDP and session signaling. The second is the use of multiple description coding to handle error resilience and user heterogeneity. In this paper we overview SEACAST, highlighting its main innovations, and providing a short summary of performance evaluation over a local testbed at Politecnico di Torino. The results show a definite performance improvement with respect to existing systems, and point out the usefulness of multiple description coding in the peer-to-peer context.