A case for 3D streaming on peer-to-peer networks

Abstract

One of the most serious issues holding back the widespread of 3D contents on Internet has been their inaccessibility due to large data volume. Many compression and progressive transmission techniques, as well as format standards, have been proposed in recent years to make 3D streaming increasingly viable for the efficient and accessible delivery of 3D contents. However, existing proposals have yet to seriously address one of the most important issues in practical adoption -a system's scalability in terms of the number of concurrent users. We argue that due to 3D contents' large data volume and interactive nature, client-server architecture, with its inherently fixed resource availability and high cost, will not be suitable to support popular Internet-scale 3D streaming. On the other hand, peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures hold the promise of both scalability and affordability. In this position paper, we describe the potential promises and challenges in adapting 3D streaming to P2P networks, using multi-user networked virtual environment (NVE) as an example. We also propose Flowing LoD (FLoD), a scalable, distributed and fault-tolerant P2P 3D streaming mechanism, that is based on Voronoi-based Overlay Network (VON), a P2P overlay specifically designed for NVE applications.

Selection strategies for peer-to-peer 3D streaming

“…Current 3D streaming scheme may be classified into four types: object streaming, scene streaming, visualization streaming and image-based streaming [6]. In this paper we focus on scene streaming, which is an extension of object streaming where many objects constitute a scene.…”

“…However, as content gets larger and more dynamic, it would become increasingly inconvenient for new users to try, or for existing users to update the content. A better way thus is to acquire only the content of interest progressively via 3D streaming techniques [20,6,3].…”

“…However, as more clients join with more requests, the server becomes a bottleneck when the data requirement exceeds its capacity. To address this, peer-to-peer (P2P) delivery has been proposed to achieve better scalability [6]. As each peer has some data in its local cache, other clients could request from their peers first when in need of similar content.…”

FLoD: A Framework for Peer-to-Peer 3D Streaming

“…Current 3D streaming schemes can be classified into four main types: object streaming, scene streaming, visualization streaming, and image-based streaming [4]. In this paper we look at scene streaming, which usually involves a collection of 3D objects placed arbitrarily in space that are streamed to clients according to user visibility or interests.…”

“…Novel understandings to the fundamental problems involved and the design of new streaming techniques thus are necessary for P2P 3D streaming. This paper builds on our earlier work [4] to provide a conceptual model for 3D scene streaming, and presents the design and evaluation of FLoD (Flowing Level-of-Details), the first P2P framework that supports 3D scene streaming for MMOG or virtual globe applications. By separating the graphics and the networking aspects of the problem, FLoD also allows both fields to tackle each aspect independently.…”