Scalable Video-On-Demand Streaming in Mobile Wireless Hybrid Networks

Video-on-demand service in wireless networks is one important step to achieving the goal of providing video services anywhere anytime. Typically, carrier mobile networks are used to deliver videos wirelessly. Since every video stream comes from the base station, regardless of what bandwidth sharing techniques are being utilized, the media stream system is still limited by the network capacity of the base station. The key to overcome the scalability issue is to exploit resources available to mobile clients in a peer-to-peer setting. We observe that it is common to have a carrier mobile network and a mobile peer-to-peer network co-existing in a wireless environment. A feature of such hybrid environment is that the former offers high availability assurance, while the latter presents an opportunistic use of resources available at mobile clients. Our proposed video-on-demand technique, PatchPeer, leverages this network characteristic to allow the video-on-demand system to scale beyond the bandwidth capacity of the server. Mobile clients in PatchPeer are no longer passive receivers, but also active senders of video streams to other mobile clients. Our extensive performance study shows that PatchPeer can accept more clients than the current state-of-the-art technique, while maintaining the same quality-of-service to clients.