Is IPFS Ready for Decentralized Video Streaming?

InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer protocol for decentralized content storage and retrieval. The IPFS platform has the potential to help users evade censorship and avoid a central point of failure. IPFS is seeing increasing adoption for distributing various kinds of files, including video. However, the performance of video streaming on IPFS has not been well-studied. We conduct a measurement study with over 28,000 videos hosted on the IPFS network and find that video streaming experiences high stall rates due to relatively high Round Trip Times (RTT). Further, videos are encoded using a single static quality, because of which streaming cannot adapt to different network conditions.

A natural approach is to use adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms for streaming, which encode videos in multiple qualities and streams according to the throughput available. However, traditional ABR algorithms perform poorly on IPFS because the throughput cannot be estimated correctly. The main problem is that video segments can be retrieved from multiple sources, making it difficult to estimate the throughput. To overcome this issue, we have designed Telescope, an IPFS-aware ABR system. We conduct experiments on the IPFS network, where IPFS video providers are geographically distributed across the globe. Our results show that Telescope significantly improves the Quality of Experience (QoE) of videos, for a diverse set of network and cache conditions, compared to traditional ABR.