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

Peer-to-peer stream merging for stored multimedia

In recent years, with the fast development of resource capability of both the Internet and personal computers, multimedia applications like video-on-demand (VOD) streaming have gained dramatic growth and been shown to be potential killer applications in the current and next-generation Internet. Scalable deployment of these applications has become a hot problem area due to the potentially high server and network bandwidth required in these systems.The conventional approach in a VOD streaming system dedicates a media stream for each client request, which is not scalable in a wide-area delivery system serving potentially very large numbers of clients. Recently, various efficient delivery techniques have been proposed to improve the scalability of VOD delivery systems. One approach is to use a scalable delivery protocol based on multicast, such as periodic broadcast or stream merging. These protocols have been mostly developed for single-server based systems and attempt to have each media stream serve as many clients as possible, so as to minimize the required server and network bandwidth. However, the performance improvements possible with techniques that deliver all streams from a single server are limited, especially regarding the required network bandwidth. Another approach is based on proxy caching and content replication, such as in content delivery networks (CDN). Although this approach is able to effectively distribute load across multiple CDN servers, the cost of this approach may be high.With the focus on further improving the system efficiency regarding the server and network bandwidth requirement, a new scalable streaming protocol is developed in this work. It adapts a previously proposed technique called hierarchical multicast stream merging (HMSM) to use a peer-to-peer delivery approach. To be more efficient in media delivery, the conventional early merging policy associated with HMSM is extended to be compatible with the peer-to-peer environment, and various peer selection policies are designed for initiation of media streams. The impact of limited peer resource capability is also studied in this work. In the performance study, a number of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new protocol and various design policies, and promising results are reported

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Taxonomy of P2P Applications

Peer-to-peer (p2p) networks have gained immense popularity in recent years and the number of services they provide continuously rises. Where p2p-networks were formerly known as file-sharing networks, p2p is now also used for services like VoIP and IPTV. With so many different p2p applications and services the need for a taxonomy framework rises. This paper describes the available p2p applications grouped by the services they provide. A taxonomy framework is proposed to classify old and recent p2p applications based on their characteristics

The state of peer-to-peer network simulators

Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results

Analyzing Peer Selection Policies for BitTorrent Multimedia On-Demand Streaming Systems in Internet

The adaptation of the BitTorrent protocol to multimedia on-demand streaming systems essentially lies on the modification of its two core algorithms, namely the piece and the peer selection policies, respectively. Much more attention has though been given to the piece selection policy. Within this context, this article proposes three novel peer selection policies for the design of BitTorrent-like protocols targeted at that type of systems: Select Balanced Neighbour Policy (SBNP), Select Regular Neighbour Policy (SRNP), and Select Optimistic Neighbour Policy (SONP). These proposals are validated through a competitive analysis based on simulations which encompass a variety of multimedia scenarios, defined in function of important characterization parameters such as content type, content size, and client interactivity profile. Service time, number of clients served and efficiency retrieving coefficient are the performance metrics assessed in the analysis. The final results mainly show that the novel proposals constitute scalable solutions that may be considered for real project designs. Lastly, future work is included in the conclusion of this paper.Comment: 19 PAGE

CliqueStream: an efficient and fault-resilient live streaming network on a clustered peer-to-peer overlay

Several overlay-based live multimedia streaming platforms have been proposed in the recent peer-to-peer streaming literature. In most of the cases, the overlay neighbors are chosen randomly for robustness of the overlay. However, this causes nodes that are distant in terms of proximity in the underlying physical network to become neighbors, and thus data travels unnecessary distances before reaching the destination. For efficiency of bulk data transmission like multimedia streaming, the overlay neighborhood should resemble the proximity in the underlying network. In this paper, we exploit the proximity and redundancy properties of a recently proposed clique-based clustered overlay network, named eQuus, to build efficient as well as robust overlays for multimedia stream dissemination. To combine the efficiency of content pushing over tree structured overlays and the robustness of data-driven mesh overlays, higher capacity stable nodes are organized in tree structure to carry the long haul traffic and less stable nodes with intermittent presence are organized in localized meshes. The overlay construction and fault-recovery procedures are explained in details. Simulation study demonstrates the good locality properties of the platform. The outage time and control overhead induced by the failure recovery mechanism are minimal as demonstrated by the analysis.Comment: 10 page

Cooperative Caching for Multimedia Streaming in Overlay Networks

Traditional data caching, such as web caching, only focuses on how to boost the hit rate of requested objects in caches, and therefore, how to reduce the initial delay for object retrieval. However, for multimedia objects, not only reducing the delay of object retrieval, but also provisioning reasonably stable network bandwidth to clients, while the fetching of the cached objects goes on, is important as well. In this paper, we propose our cooperative caching scheme for a multimedia delivery scenario, supporting a large number of peers over peer-to-peer overlay networks. In order to facilitate multimedia streaming and downloading service from servers, our caching scheme (1) determines the appropriate availability of cached stream segments in a cache community, (2) determines the appropriate peer for cache replacement, and (3) performs bandwidth-aware and availability-aware cache replacement. By doing so, it achieves (1) small delay of stream retrieval, (2) stable bandwidth provisioning during retrieval session, and (3) load balancing of clients' requests among peers