Distributed Job Scheduling in a Peer-to-Peer Video Recording System

Abstract: Since the advent of Gnutella, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols have matured towards a fundamental design element for large-scale, self-organising distributed systems. Many research efforts have been invested to improve various aspects of P2P systems, like their performance, scalability, and so on. However, little experience has been gathered from the actual deployment of such P2P systems apart from the typical file sharing applications. To bridge this gap and to gain more experience in making the transition from theory to practice, we started building advanced P2P applications whose explicit goal is “to be deployed in the wild”. In this paper, we describe a fully decentralised P2P video recording system. Every node in the system is a networked computer (desktop PC or set-top box) capable of receiving and recording DVB-S, i.e. digital satellite TV. Like a normal video recorder, users can program their machines to record certain programmes. With our system, they will be able to schedule multiple recordings in parallel. It is the task of the system to assign the recordings to different machines in the network. Moreover, users can “record broadcasts in the past”, i.e. the system serves as a short-term archival storag