Members

Project Report

Reference

Code download

To overcome the limited bandwidth of streaming servers, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are deployed on the edge of the Internet. A large number of such servers have to be installed to serve the user pool of a popular service, making CDN a very expensive way to distribute media. The primary concern of this research is to find an inexpensive way to alleviate the traffic load for media streaming on the servers in a continuous media service infrastructure. Our approach to solve the above problem is motivated by the emerging new concept of peer-to-peer computing. Specifically, we let clients that obtained a media object act as streaming servers for following requests to that media object. Unlike the server/client scheme, peers are heterogeneous in the storage capacity and out-bound bandwidth they can contribute. Secondly, peers are heterogeneous in the duration of their commitment to the community. In our research, we identified the following problems in the context of peer-to-peer streaming: 1) How does the come-and-go behavior of peers affect the system performance? 2). How do we manage the limited resources contributed by each peer? 3). The design of a peer-to-peer streaming protocol that handles peer failure. Solutions to these problems are described and analyzed.

Group Members

* Shan Lei is now with Google, Inc.

Project Report

Final report of the project can be found here in html, word, and pdf formats.

The analytical part of this project is published in Proceedings of ACM/SPIE Conference on Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN) 2004. Here is the final draft: [ps] [pdf].

A more complete version is accepted to be published as a full research paper in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP).

Paper is now published in the November 2005 issue of TOMCCAP, which is available from the ACM digital library. Here is a copy of the paper: [download paper][bibtex]

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Last updated: 2006-02-10 11:07:14