Coordinate Live Streaming and Storage Sharing for Social Media Content Distribution

The recently emerged user-generated contents (UGC) services, social networking services (SNS), as well as the pervasive wireless mobile network services have formed social media which has drastically changed the content distribution landscape. Today such UGC applications as YouTube allow any user to be a content provider, generating enormous amount of video contents that are quickly and extensively propagated on the Internet through such SNSes as Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, the existing UGC sites are facing critical server bottlenecks and the surges created by the social networking users would make the situation even worse. To better understand the challenges and opportunities therein, we investigate users' social behavior and personal preference of online video sharing from both real-trace measurement study on a popular social networking website and a user questionnaire survey. Our data analysis reveals an interesting coexistence of live streaming and storage sharing, and that the users are generally more interested in watching their friend's videos. It further suggests that even though the traffic is significant, most users are willing to share their resources to assist others, implying user collaboration is a rational choice in this context. In this paper, we present Coordinated Live Streaming and Storage Sharing (COOLS), a system for efficient peer-to-peer posting of user-generated videos. Through a novel ID code design that embeds nodes' locations in an overlay, COOLS leverages stable storage users and yet inherently prioritizes living streaming flows. We also present the improvement of the basic overlay design. The evaluation results show that, as compared to other state-of-the-art solutions, COOLS successfully takes advantage of the coexistence of live streaming and storage sharing, providing better scalability, robustness, and streaming quality.