Increasingly, content delivery solutions leverage client resources in exchange for services in a pee-to-peer (P2P) fashion. Such peer-assisted service paradigm promises significant infrastructure cost
reduction, but suffers from the unpredictability associated with client resources, which is often exhibited as an imbalance between the contribution and consumption of resources by clients. This imbalance hinders the ability to guarantee a minimum service fidelity of these services to clients especially for real-time applications where content can not be cached. In this thesis, we propose a
novel architectural service model that enables the establishment of higher fidelity services through (1) coordinating the content delivery to efficiently utilize the available resources, and (2) leasing the least additional cloud resources, available through special nodes (angels) that join the service on-demand, and only if needed, to complement the scarce resources available through clients.
While the proposed service model can be deployed in many settings, this thesis focuses on peer-assisted content delivery applications, in which the scarce resource is typically the upstream
capacity of clients. We target three applications that require the delivery of real-time as opposed to stale content. The first application is bulk-synchronous transfer, in which the goal of the system is
to minimize the maximum distribution time - the time it takes to deliver the content to all clients in a group. The second application is live video streaming, in which the goal of the system is to maintain
a given streaming quality. The third application is Tor, the anonymous onion routing network, in which the goal of the system is to boost performance (increase throughput and reduce latency)
throughout the network, and especially for clients running bandwidth-intensive applications.
For each of the above applications, we develop analytical models that efficiently allocate the already available resources. They also efficiently allocate additional on-demand resource to achieve
a certain level of service. Our analytical models and efficient constructions depend on some simplifying, yet impractical, assumptions. Thus, inspired by our models and constructions, we develop practical techniques that we incorporate into prototypical peer-assisted angel-enabled cloud services.
We evaluate these techniques through simulation and/or implementation
