Online video accounts for a large and growing portion of all Internet traffic.
In order to cut bandwidth costs, it is necessary to use the available bandwidth of
users to offload video downloads. Assuming that users can only keep and distribute
one video at any given time, it is necessary to determine the global user cache
distribution with the goal of achieving maximum peer traffic.
The system model contains three different parties: viewers, idlers and servers.
Viewers are those peers who are currently viewing a video. Idlers are those peers
who are currently not viewing a video but are available to upload to others. Finally,
servers can upload any video to any user and has infinite capacity.
Every video maintains a first-in-first-out viewer queue which contains all the
viewers for that video. Each viewer downloads from the peer that arrived before it,
with the earliest arriving peer downloading from the server. Thus, the server must
upload to one peer whenever the viewer queue is not empty. The aim of the idlers
is to act as a server for a particular video, thereby eliminating all server traffic
for that video. By using the popularity of videos, the number of idlers and some
assumptions on the viewer arrival process, the optimal global video distribution in
the user caches can be determined
