MeshTV

About

Technology Internet TV is centralised and non scalable due to large bandwidth requirements based on the sole content transmitter. Researchers in Trinity have developed MeshTV; a peer to peer (P2P) Internet TV broadcasting system. MeshTV works by having the primary transmitter send content to a small number of computers who in turn replicate content to other computers and so on. This distributes bandwidth requirements across all participating computers. The system is comprised of a number of decentralised algorithms for adapting mesh overlay. The overlay adapts so that all peers download media content at approximately the same rate. This system can therefore be used by TV broadcasters to provide high definition live broadcasts over the internet.   Advantages The key challenge addressed is the provision of large and complex content to internet users without the difficulties created by bandwidth limitations. There is a growing interest in application-level P2P approaches that do not require specific support from the network using viewer bandwidth to reduce server consumption of the content provider. Live media streaming does not scale with current client server based approaches due to large bandwidth and server requirements of the content provider. MeshTV addresses limitations of existing peer-to-peer live streaming systems that adapt poorly to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the internet.  A distinguishing characteristic of a mesh overlay is that it supports connections between any two peers.