Enabling DVD-like features in P2P video-on-demand systems

  • Authors:
  • Nevena Vratonjić;Priya Gupta;Nikola Knežević;Dejan Kostić;Antony Rowstron

  • Affiliations:
  • EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;IIT, Delhi, India;EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland;Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Peer-to-peer streaming and IP-TV
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (p2p) video-on-demand (VoD) is increasingly popular with Internet users. Currently deployed pure p2p VoD systems provide poor general performance and they lack advanced features such as fast forward and seeking to arbitrary points. Peer-assisted VoD systems can provide such services, but they require very well provisioned source servers (or server farms). We propose BulletMedia, a system that uses proactive caching to attempt to provide advanced features without requiring a well provisioned server. In BulletMedia, blocks are altruistically replicated by peers not to aid immediate playback but to simply increase the number of replicas of each block. This helps ensure that blocks are available in-overlay and reduces dependence on the source. BulletMedia combines a traditional overlay mesh approach with a structured overlay. The overlay mesh is used to fetch blocks at a high rate, while the structured overlay is used to enable efficient block discovery and to control block replication. Initial experimental results from a prototype BulletMedia implementation demonstrate that it can both effectively control in-overlay block replication and can efficiently use these replicas to perform forward seeks.