Recent studies have convinced that network coding can improve the performance of live media streaming in terms of startup delay, resilience to peer dynamics, as well as reduced bandwidth cost on dedicated streaming servers. However, there still exist some strategy drawbacks and neglected problems which need to be further researched. In addition to the commonly used evaluation parameters of the network and user experiences mentioned above, we focus on additional key factors, playback lag and switch lag, which have not been fully explored in previous work. In this paper, we present SonicStream, a novel and fully implemented live peer to peer (P2P) media streaming system with consideration of rich user experiences, including startup delay, playback continuity, playback lag, switch lag, etc. In pursuit of a further enhanced user experience, we revise traditional peer selection/data scheduling methods. Through a series of experimental evaluations and a cautious comparison with the latest similar work R-2, the superior performance of SonicStream has been preliminarily verified.
