Abstract:Providing video on demand service over the Internet in a scalable way is a challenging problem. This paper proposes an architecture for video on demand streaming in peer-to-peer environment, in which each peer node has a fixed-size FIFO buffer to cache the most recent content of the video stream it receives and can provide service to subsequent reached proper peer nodes. It has the following properties: 1) it utilizes a distributed control protocol to support the joining and leaving processes of peer nodes in a scalable way; 2) it considers the issue of integrity of the received program in service recovering process of the interrupted nodes. Performance studies based on simulation are carried out, and the results show that the system architecture outperforms a recently proposed system architecture P2VoD in a number of important performance metrics such as the server’s load, client join rejection probability, network resource usage ratio, program integrity ratio and so on.