Realizing on-demand media streaming in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fashion is more challenging than in the case of live media streaming, since only peers with close-by media play progresses may help each other in obtaining the media content. The situation is further complicated if we wish to pursue low link cost in the transmission. In this paper, we present a new algorithmic perspective towards on-demand P2P streaming protocol design. While previous approaches employ streaming trees or passive neighbour reconciliation for media content distribution, we instead coordinate the streaming session as an auction where each peer participates locally by bidding for and selling media flows encoded with network coding. We show that this auction approach is promising in achieving low-cost on-demand streaming in a scalable fashion. It is amenable to asynchronous, distributed, and light-weight implementations, and is flexible enough to provide support for random-seek and pause functionalities.
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