Content distribution in content delivery networks

Abstract

The modern development of broadband networking technology has made the application of real-time video streaming services feasible. Attractive applications such as entertainment video-on-demand, digital library, and on-line news service built on top of realtime media streaming service are now available for the public. One admired practice for providing efficient streaming services is to use the technique of Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Media content is replicated and distributed to different sites on Internet, usually on the edge of the Internet. This technique can avoid any individual locations being swamped by requests. The cost of deploy and maintain a CDN is extremely high for considering the massive CPU power, storage capacity and output bandwidth each CDN server has to possess. This brings incredible challenges to design a highly cost-effective, scalable and robust media streaming system. In this project, a novel streaming system architecture is proposed which incorporates the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques into the Content Delivery Networks. The new system can improve the existing CDN performance with significantly reducing the cost of CDN capacity reservation, lowering the rejection rate from CDN servers as well as maintaining the high quality of media delivery.