Towards cinematic internet video-on-demand

ABSTRACT

Video-on-demand (VoD) is increasingly popular with Internet users. It gives users greater choice and more control than live streaming or file downloading. Systems such as MSN Video and YouTube deliver content at low bitrates. This may suit short clips, but great films and 5-minute bloopers are as different as symphonies and jingles. For cinema, poor quality and high jitter are less acceptable. Combining user control with high bitrate is compelling, but technically challenging.

VoD is expensive due to the load it places on video source servers. Many researchers have proposed using peer-to-peer (P2P) techniques to shift load from sources to peers (peer-assistance), yet none have implemented and deployed a system with the first purpose of openly and systematically evaluating this approach. To fill this void, we have built and deployed GridCast¹. GridCast doubles the bitrates of current popular internet VoD systems, provides a full set of VCR² operations, and employs peer-assistance to improve scalability and continuity. GridCast has been live on CERNET³ since May of 2006. In peak months, GridCast has served videos to approximately 23,000 users. From the beginning, we have gathered information to understand GridCast and improve its algorithms.

This paper introduces and evaluates GridCast. In May of 2007, we deployed multivideo caching, a major change to the caching algorithms. This paper analyzes scalability and continuity before and after this change. Our results contain several surprises and underline the importance of deployment to validate simulation results. We discuss what improvements can be developed beyond multivideo caching.

REFERENCES

• 1: Siddhartha Annapureddy , Saikat Guha , Christos Gkantsidis , Dinan Gunawardena , Pablo Rodriguez Rodriguez, Is high-quality vod feasible using P2P swarming?, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1242572.1242694]
• 2: CERNET. China Education and Research Network Annual Report, 2006.
• 3: CNNIC. The 20th CNNIC Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China, July 2007.
• 4: B. Cohen. Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent. In P2PEcon, June 2003.
• 5: L. Cui, B. Li, and K. Nahrstedt. oStream: Asynchronous Streaming Multicast in Application-layer Overlay Networks. IEEE Journal on Selected Aread in Communications, 2004.
• 6: Krishna P. Gummadi , Richard J. Dunn , Stefan Saroiu , Steven D. Gribble , Henry M. Levy , John Zahorjan, Measurement, modeling, and analysis of a peer-to-peer file-sharing workload, Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY, USA
• 7: Yang Guo , Kyoungwon Suh , Jim Kurose , Don Towsley, P2Cast: peer-to-peer patching scheme for VoD service, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, May 20-24, 2003, Budapest, Hungary [doi>10.1145/775152.775195]
• 8: Y. J. Hall, P. Piemonte, and M. Weyant. Joost: A Measurement Study. Technical report, School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, May 2007.
• 9: M. Handley , V. Jacobson, SDP: Session Description Protocol, RFC Editor, 1998
• 10: Cheng Huang , Jin Li , Keith W. Ross, Can internet video-on-demand be profitable?, Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 27-31, 2007, Kyoto, Japan
• 11: X. Liao, H. Jin, Y. Liu, M. Ni, and D. Deng. AnySee: Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming. In Proc. of INFOCOM, 2006.
• 12: H. Schulzrinne , S. Casner , R. Frederick , V. Jacobson, RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications, RFC Editor, 2003
• 13: H. Schulzrinne , A. Rao , R. Lanphier, Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), RFC Editor, 1998
• 14: Kunwadee Sripanidkulchai , Bruce Maggs , Hui Zhang, An analysis of live streaming workloads on the internet, Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, October 25-27, 2004, Taormina, Sicily, Italy [doi>10.1145/1028788.1028795]
• 15: Yu-Wei Sung , Michael Bishop , Sanjay Rao, Enabling contribution awareness in an overlay broadcasting system, Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, September 11-15, 2006, Pisa, Italy
• 16: D. Tai, H. A. Kien, and T. Mounir. P2VoD: Providing Fault Tolerant Video-on-Demand Streaming in Peer-to-Peer Environment. In Proc. of ICC 2004, 2004.
• 17: D. Wang and J. Liu. Peer-to-Peer Asynchronous Video Streaming using Skip List. In Proc. of ICME, 2006.
• 18: X. Zhang, J. Liu, B. Li, and Y. S. P. Yum. CoolStreaming/DONet: A Data-driven Overlay Network for Peer-to-peer Live Media Streaming. In Proc. of INFOCOM, 2005.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations

Keywords:
caching, peer-to-peer, video-on-demand