A decentralized scheduler for distributed video streaming in a server-less video streaming system

Recently, a server-less video-on-demand architecture has been proposed to eliminate costly dedicated video servers and yet it is highly scalable and reliable. However, because of the potentially large number of user hosts streaming video data to a receiver for playback, the aggregate network traffic can become very bursty, leading to significant packet loss at the access routers. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel network-aware transmission scheduler called least schedulable first (LSF) to reduce the traffic burstiness. Simulation results show that LSF can reduce the congestion-induced packet loss from over 95% to 0.05% in a 500-host system at 0.95 system utilization. Moreover, LSF can adapt to variations in the underlying network, is inherently distributed, and does not require synchronization among hosts in the system.