Improving BitTorrent's Peer Selection For Multimedia Content On-Demand Delivery

The great efficiency achieved by the BitTorrent protocol for the distribution of large amounts of data inspired its adoption to provide multimedia content on-demand delivery over the Internet. As it is not designed for this purpose, some adjustments have been proposed in order to meet the related QoS requirements like low startup delay and smooth playback continuity. Accordingly, this paper introduces a BitTorrent-like proposal named as Quota-Based Peer Selection (QBPS). This proposal is mainly based on the adaptation of the original peer-selection policy of the BitTorrent protocol. Its validation is achieved by means of simulations and competitive analysis. The final results show that QBPS outperforms other recent proposals of the literature. For instance, it achieves a throughput optimization of up to 48.0% in low-provision capacity scenarios where users are very interactive.Comment: International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications(IJCNC) Vol.7, No.6, November 201

Video-on-Demand over Internet: a survey of existing systems and solutions

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client/server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services, so there have been many proposals of systems, mostly based on a peer-to-peer or on a hybrid server/peer-to-peer solution, to solve this issue. This work presents a survey of the currently existing or proposed systems and solutions, based upon a subset of representative systems, and defines selection criteria allowing to classify these systems. These criteria are based on common questions such as, for example, is it video-on-demand or live streaming, is the architecture based on content delivery network, peer-to-peer or both, is the delivery overlay tree-based or mesh-based, is the system push-based or pull-based, single-stream or multi-streams, does it use data coding, and how do the clients choose their peers. Representative systems are briefly described to give a summarized overview of the proposed solutions, and four ones are analyzed in details. Finally, it is attempted to evaluate the most promising solutions for future experiments. Résumé La vidéo à la demande est un service où des films sont fournis à distance aux utilisateurs avec u

How much can large-scale video-on-demand benefit from users' cooperation?

We propose an analytical framework to tightly characterize the scaling laws for the additional bandwidth that servers must supply to guarantee perfect service in peer-assisted Video-on-Demand systems, taking into account essential aspects such as peer churn, bandwidth heterogeneity, and Zipf-like video popularity. Our results reveal that the catalog size and the content popularity distribution have a huge effect on the system performance. We show that users' cooperation can effectively reduce the servers' burden for a wide range of system parameters, confirming to be an attractive solution to limit the costs incurred by content providers as the system scales to large populations of user

How much can large-scale Video-On-Demand benefit from users’ cooperation?

We propose an analytical framework to tightly characterize the scaling laws for the additional bandwidth that servers must supply to guarantee perfect service in peer-assisted Video-on-Demand systems, taking into account essential aspects such as peer churn, bandwidth heterogeneity, and Zipf-like video popularity. Our results reveal that the catalog size and the content popularity distribution have a huge effect on the system performance. We show that users' cooperation can effectively reduce the servers' burden for a wide range of system parameters, confirming to be an attractive solution to limit the costs incurred by content providers as the system scales to large populations of users

Stochastic Analysis of Self-Sustainability in Peer-Assisted VoDSystems

Abstract—We consider a peer-assisted Video-on-demand system, in which video distribution is supported both by peers caching the whole video and by peers concurrently downloading it. We propose a stochastic fluid framework that allows to characterize the additional bandwidth requested from the servers to satisfy all users watching a given video. We obtain analytical upper bounds to the server bandwidth needed in the case in which users download the video content sequentially. We also present a methodology to obtain exact solutions for special cases of peer upload bandwidth distribution. Our bounds permit to tightly characterize the performance of peer-assisted VoD systems as the number of users increases, for both sequential and nonsequential delivery schemes. In particular, we rigorously prove that the simple sequential scheme is asymptotically optimal both in the bandwidth surplus and in the bandwidth deficit mode, and that peer-assisted systems become totally self-sustaining in the surplus mode as the number of users grows large. I