Large Scale Distributed Storage and Search for a Video on Demand Streaming System

In the trend towards all IP networks, providing video services has proven to be a challenging task due to the high bandwidth requirements and the low delay and loss constraints. The architectural approaches taken by corporations to date mainly involve costly solutions that are difficult to manage and scale. Although IP multicast attempts to deal with the scalability of these systems at the network layer, it has not been widely deployed due to the extra cost of management and replacement of the existing infrastructure that involves. Therefore, if next generation service providers are to deliver high quality and on-demand video streaming to a large number of clients, new streaming methodologies such as peer-to-peer (P2P) need to be deployed to alleviate some of the current challenges involved in video streaming. We propose an effective and deployable solution for next generation video on demand (VoD) service providers based on a multilayered hybrid P2P topology for the distribution of and search for content, that addresses the requirements of low startup delay, provision of VCR-like commands and the scalability and management of a VoD streaming system.