Towards Cost-effective On-demand continuous Media Service: A Peer-to- Peer Approach

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 make the whole system scalable, 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 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 behaviors 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. 1

GLive: The Gradient overlay as a market maker for mesh-based P2P live streaming

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live video streaming over the Internet is becoming increasingly popular, but it is still plagued by problems of high playback latency and intermittent playback streams. This paper presents GLive, a distributed market-based solution that builds a mesh overlay for P2P live streaming. The mesh overlay is constructed such that (i) nodes with increasing upload bandwidth are located closer to the media source, and (ii) nodes with similar upload bandwidth become neighbours. We introduce a market-based approach that matches nodes willing and able to share the stream with one another. However, market-based approaches converge slowly on random overlay networks, and we improve the rate of convergence by adapting our market-based algorithm to exploit the clustering of nodes with similar upload bandwidths in our mesh overlay. We address the problem of free-riding through nodes preferentially uploading more of the stream to the best uploaders. We compare GLive with our previous tree-based streaming protocol, Sepidar, and NewCoolstreaming in simulation, and our results show significantly improved playback continuity and playback latency

GRIDKIT: Pluggable overlay networks for Grid computing

A `second generation' approach to the provision of Grid middleware is now emerging which is built on service-oriented architecture and web services standards and technologies. However, advanced Grid applications have significant demands that are not addressed by present-day web services platforms. As one prime example, current platforms do not support the rich diversity of communication `interaction types' that are demanded by advanced applications (e.g. publish-subscribe, media streaming, peer-to-peer interaction). In the paper we describe the Gridkit middleware which augments the basic service-oriented architecture to address this particular deficiency. We particularly focus on the communications infrastructure support required to support multiple interaction types in a unified, principled and extensible manner-which we present in terms of the novel concept of pluggable overlay networks

Content-access QoS in peer-to-peer networks using a fast MDS erasure code

This paper describes an enhancement of content access Quality of Service in peer to peer (P2P) networks. The main idea is to use an erasure code to distribute the information over the peers. This distribution increases the users’ choice on disseminated encoded data and therefore statistically enhances the overall throughput of the transfer. A performance evaluation based on an original model using the results of a measurement campaign of sequential and parallel downloads in a real P2P network over Internet is presented. Based on a bandwidth distribution, statistical content-access QoS are guaranteed in function of both the content replication level in the network and the file dissemination strategies. A simple application in the context of media streaming is proposed. Finally, the constraints on the erasure code related to the proposed system are analysed and a new fast MDS erasure code is proposed, implemented and evaluated