31 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 3 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1613-4.ch003 INTRODUCTION In recent years, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has gained much consideration after its successful achievement from its file sharing ability such as BitTorrent (Liu et al., 2008) and, more recently, in multimedia streaming. The concept of P2P net- working is realized by encouraging the end users to contribute to the network resources and act as client and server simultaneously. That is, each user can upload and download directly from/to other us- ers avoiding central entities. The motive behind is the cooperation among them to overcome various limitations of the more conventional Client-Server Majed Alhaisoni University of Ha’il, Saudi Arabia Antonio Liotta Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands Pervasive Streaming via Peer-to-Peer Networks ABSTRACT Media streaming is an essential element of many applications, including the emerging area of mobile systems and services. Internet broadcasting, conferencing, video-on-demand, online gaming, and a variety of other time-constrained applications are gaining signifcant momentum. Yet, streaming in a pervasive environment is not mature enough to address challenges such as scalability, heterogeneity, and latency. In a client-server system, streaming servers introduce computational and network bottlenecks affecting the scalability of the system and mobile client exhibit intermittent behavior and high-latency connections. This chapter explores ways that several proposed peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems deploy to address some of these challenges. An initial introduction on P2P network fundamentals and classifcations provides the necessary background information to focus on and assimilate the differ- ent mechanisms that enable scalable and resilient streaming in a pervasive environment. The most interesting developments are presented in an accessible way by revisiting the features of common P2P streaming applications. This approach helps in identifying a range of burning research issues that are still undergoing investigation.