Offering High-Definition Peer-Assisted Video on-Demand Systems: Modeling, Optimization and Evaluation
Date
2013-07-24
Authors
Chang, Le
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Abstract
The past decade has witnessed the fast development of peer-assisted video ondemand (PA-VoD) systems, which have attracted millions of online users. The efforts on improving the quality of video programs have never ceased since the beginning, and nowadays offering high-definition (HD) channels has become a common practice. However, compared with standard-definition (SD) channels, HD channels have to sustain a higher streaming rate to peers, which is a challenging task. In real systems, HD channels often suffer from poor streaming quality, or impose a heavy burden on the servers.
This thesis conducts an in-depth study on peer cache and upload bandwidth management at the same time for multi-channel PA-VoD systems, where HD and SD channels coexist with different bandwidth and cache requirements. The objective is to minimize the server bandwidth consumption, and thus the maintenance cost of VoD service providers. The solution is cross-channel allocation (or view-upload decoupling), i.e., making SD channels help HD viewers with the surplus peer-contributed resources. The management of these resources includes bandwidth allocation and caching strategies.
We first propose a generic modeling framework to capture the essential characteristics of PA-VoD systems: the demand and supply of bandwidth from peers. Our modeling framework can be customized or extended to model a variety of caching strategies, including FIFO, passive caching, and active caching with different user behaviors. We then apply the modeling framework to two representative scenarios: stationary scenarios, where the channels have fixed popularity; and non-stationary scenarios, in which a new movie is released, and peers enter the channel in a flash-crowd manner. We prove using our models that passive caching is efficient for stationary user behaviors, and derive the optimal caching solutions when the channels in the system demonstrate different popularity evolutions, i.e., with non-stationary behaviors.
With the insights gained from our modeling work, we design effective centralized heuristic algorithms and practical distributed strategies for peer cache replacement and upload bandwidth allocation, with a near-optimal utilization of these resources. We propose centralized and distributed cross-channel allocation, and also extend the substreaming technique from live streaming to VoD systems, where it demonstrates its extreme feasibility. Our extensive simulation results verify the efficacy of these heuristic and practical strategies.
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Keywords
Peer-assisted video on-demand (PA-VoD) systems, resource balancing, bandwidth allocation, caching strategies, modeling, optimization