Efficient Proxy-Based Internet Media Distribution Control and Privacy Protection Infrastructure

Massive Internet media distribution demands pro longed continuous consumption of networking and disk band widths in large capacity. Many proxy-based Internet media distribution algorithms and systems have been proposed, implemented, and evaluated to address the scalability issue. However, few of them have been used in practice, since two important issues are not satisfactorily addressed. First, existing proxy-based media distribution architectures lack an efficient media distribution control mechanism. Without protection on the Internet, content providers are hesitant to use existing fast distribution techniques. Second, little has been done to protect client privacy during client accesses. Straightforward solutions to address these two issues independently lead to conflicts. For example, to enforce distribution control, only legitimate users should be granted access rights. However, this normally discloses more information (such as which object the client is accessing) other than the client identity, which conflicts with the client's desire for privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a unified proxy-based media distribution protocol to effectively address these two problems simultaneously. We further design a set of new algorithms for cooperative proxies where our proposed scheme works practically. Simulation results show that our proposed strategy is efficient