Digital media companies have recently started embracing P2P networks as an alternative content distribution channel. However, the drawback of the current {\em P2P swarming} systems is that users need to download the full video and, hence, wait a long time before they can start watching it. While a lot of effort has gone into optimizing the distribution of large files, little research has been done on how to enable high-quality Video-on-Demand (VoD) functionality with P2P swarming systems. The main challenges reside in ensuring that users can start watching a movie at any point in time, while providing small start-up times, sustainable playback rates and high swarming efficiencies.
In this work, we explore the feasibility of providing high-quality VoD using P2P mesh-based networks. To this extent, we investigate scheduling and pre-fetching techniques, network coding, and mesh topology management. Using both simulations and results from a real implementation, we provide evidence that high-quality VoD is feasible, and give guidelines to enable play-as-you-download P2P swarming systems with high playback rates and minimum start-up delays.