Demands for multimedia content, one form of digital content, are continuously increasing at a phenomenal pace, as video features are commonly available on personal devices, such as iPod, cell phone, laptop, PDA, and Blackberry. The streaming service poses unique bandwidth and delay challenges to application designers. The size of a typical video content is usually orders of magnitude larger than that of any other type of content, resulting in high demands for bandwidth contribution from the content providers. Even more challenging, the content must be delivered to end hosts in real time to maintain smooth playback, i.e., the content must be transmitted at a satisfactory rate. In this thesis, we present our research towards a high-quality peer-to-peer live streaming system that utilizes network coding, a novel technique that permits coding at every peer, which has proven benefits in file dissemination applications. To ensure the practicality of our work, it is our imperative objective to conduct all experiments under realistic settings.

Demands for multimedia content, one form of digital content, are continuously increasing at a phenomenal pace, as video features are commonly available on personal devices, such as iPod, cell phone, laptop, PDA, and Blackberry. The streaming service poses unique bandwidth and delay challenges to application designers. The size of a typical video content is usually orders of magnitude larger than that of any other type of content, resulting in high demands for bandwidth contribution from the content providers. Even more challenging, the content must be delivered to end hosts in real time to maintain smooth playback, i.e., the content must be transmitted at a satisfactory rate. In this thesis, we present our research towards a high-quality peer-to-peer live streaming system that utilizes network coding, a novel technique that permits coding at every peer, which has proven benefits in file dissemination applications. To ensure the practicality of our work, it is our imperative objective to conduct all experiments under realistic settings.