A peer-to-peer architecture for live streaming with DRM

DRM is becoming more and more important for P2P live streaming. In this paper, a manageable overlay network architecture with DRM, is proposed for live streaming. The system consists of register server, index servers, supernodes and peers. The register server authorizes the peers, assign the key and index server list; The index server acts as the centralized index server to store the peer list, program list, and buffer information of peers. Supernodes are special peers which store the bigger buffer of live streaming. Each peer periodically exchanges data availability information with the assigned index server. The peer can retrieve correspondingly unavailable data from partners given by index server using the proposed scheduling algorithm. It also supports DRM in register server. The proposed system has been demonstrated based on CERNET of China. Good streaming quality can be achieved due to its global optimization and the digital right of video contents can be protected to some extent.