Design and analysis of a peer-assisted VOD provisioning system for managed networks

作者：Pedro Munoz Gea Juan; Nafaa Abdelhamid; Malgosa Sanahuja Josemaria; Rohmer Thibaud

来源：Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2014, 70(3): 1363-1398.

DOI：10.1007/s11042-012-1171-4

• Video-on-Demand
• P2P streaming
• Set-top boxes
• Resource allocation

With the rise of VOD (Video-on-Demand) services provisioning as a successful service on the Internet and managed networks, we are witnessing a drive towards cost-efficiency and economies of scale. Many broadband operators around the world are experimenting with P2P (Peer-to-Peer) systems centered on STBs (Set-Top-Boxes) to increase the competitiveness of their VOD services offering. By leveraging the storage and uplink bandwidth capacities available at a certain number of STBs operated by the broadband operator, the savings in terms of backend streaming capacities will represent sizable and decisive gains in cost. In these systems, video contents are usually fragmented into a number of complementary content fragments, called sub-streams, which are randomly injected in the network of STBs, and the VOD service is essentially provisioned through multisource streaming sessions from neighboring STBs to the requesting STB. One of the main challenges in such peer-assisted streaming systems remains the maximization of the utilization of STB resources utility for a given content popularity pattern. In this paper, we specifically focus on the content injection strategy and how the different content fragments should be dispatched in the network to achieve the highest performance in the VOD services provisioning epoch. We demonstrate that the random injection strategy is not appropriate for maximizing the number of simultaneous VOD streaming sessions in the network. Our objective is to first gain a better understanding of the factors driving P2P-based VOD streaming systems and provide guidelines to better operate such systems and ultimately give service operators the tools to achieve different performance objectives and/or fit specific network configurations. Further, we propose a new content dispatching strategy that maximizes the number of served VOD sessions by balancing the streaming load among the different STBs. Finally, we propose a complementary streaming resources reprovisioning mechanism that acts in real-time to reprovision the resources for serving VOD sessions to new STBs and to release trapped resources for new incoming VOD service requests.

• 出版日期2014-6