On ISP-Friendly Rate Allocation for Peer-Assisted VoD Jiajun Wang Cheng Huang Jin Li Univ. of California, Berkeley Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Berkeley, CA, U.S.A. Redmond, WA, U.S.A. Redmond, WA, U.S.A.
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT ing demand is adding significant pressure to existing server- Peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution is able to greatly re- based infrastructures, such as data centers and content dis- duce dependence on infrastructure servers and scale up to tribution networks (CDNs), which are already under heavy the demand of the Internet video era. However, the rapid burden living up to their current load. As a result, high- growth of P2P applications has also created immense burden profile failures are not uncommon, such as MSNBC’s demo- on service providers by generating significant ISP-unfriendly cratic presidential debate webcast mess and the Operah web traffic, such as cross-ISP and inter-POP traffic. In this work, show crash, not to mention that Internet itself is predicted we consider the unique properties of peer-assisted Video-on- to melt down if online video becomes mainstream [2]. Demand (VoD) and design a distributed rate allocation al- Fortunately, on the heel of such crisis, comes the help gorithm, which can significantly cut down on ISP-unfriendly of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. Indeed, Internet video traffic without much impact on server load. Through exten- streaming (both on-demand and live broadcast) using vari- sive packet-level simulation with both synthetic and real- ous peer-to-peer or peer-assisted frameworks has been shown world traces, we show that the rate allocation algorithm can to greatly reduce the dependence on infrastructure servers, achieve substantial additional gain, on top of previously pro- as well as bypass bottlenecks between content providers and posed schemes advocating ISP-friendly topologies.