Optimal chaining and implementation for large scale multimedia streaming

Chaining is a promising technique in alleviating the network and the server load by serving numbers of clients in a single server stream. In this scheme, each client temporarily stores the ongoing media stream in the client buffer and forwards it to another client with adequate buffering delay to meet the next client playback time. Therefore, the clients request the same video program can be chained together if the client buffer is large enough to bridge clients' playback time. However, existing chaining schemes do not efficiently exploit the client buffer space. In this paper, we present an optimal chaining algorithm to fully utilize the client buffer space and hence minimize the required server streams. Our performance comparison demonstrates that the optimal chaining scheme significantly reduces the server load over the existing chaining schemes. More importantly, the proposed scheme can integrate the streaming proxy into the video chain, which makes the video chain more reliable and flexible in real systems. This paper also presents the prototype implementation of the optimal chaining based video-on-demand system.