Distributed streaming media architecture

The recent trends in content delivery indicate that media distribution is among the fastest growing services over the Internet. The lack of QoS support in the Internet has accelerated the development of content distribution architectures and protocols employing techniques such as caching, mirroring and application layer multicast. Though there have been significant efforts in this direction, the large-scale deployment of such architectures is still a challenging problem. This motivates us to develop a novel architecture for content delivery over the best-effort Internet. Towards achieving this goal, we first identify the key components that build up the end-to-end architecture of a media distribution system and discuss their functionalities. Then, we propose a distributed streaming media architecture that is capable of addressing the requirements of client heterogeneity, scalability, and fault-tolerance, overcoming the deficiencies of traditional streaming media architectures. The proposed architecture is highly suitable for scalable encoding techniques such as Multiple Descriptive Coding and Layered Coding. To evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture, we define several performance metrics and carry out extensive simulation studies. Our studies show that clients experience better quality characteristics in the distributed architecture compared to the single server architecture. The proposed distributed architecture brings up several issues, such as quality adaptation, cache replacement and server fault-tolerance, which need further research

Distributed streaming media architecture

The recent trends in content delivery indicate that media distribution is among the fastest growing services over the Internet. The lack of QoS support in the Internet has accelerated the development of content distribution architectures and protocols employing techniques such as caching, mirroring and application layer multicast. Though there have been significant efforts in this direction, the large-scale deployment of such architectures is still a challenging problem. This motivates us to develop a novel architecture for content delivery over the best-effort Internet. Towards achieving this goal, we first identify the key components that build up the end-to-end architecture of a media distribution system and discuss their functionalities. Then, we propose a distributed streaming media architecture that is capable of addressing the requirements of client heterogeneity, scalability, and fault-tolerance, overcoming the deficiencies of traditional streaming media architectures. The proposed architecture is highly suitable for scalable encoding techniques such as Multiple Descriptive Coding and Layered Coding. To evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture, we define several performance metrics and carry out extensive simulation studies. Our studies show that clients experience better quality characteristics in the distributed architecture compared to the single server architecture. The proposed distributed architecture brings up several issues, such as quality adaptation, cache replacement and server fault-tolerance, which need further research.</p