Dragonfly: Cloud Assisted Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Multipoint Media Streaming Applications

Technology trends are not only transforming the hardware landscape of end-user devices but are also dramatically changing the types of software applications that are deployed on these devices. With the maturity of cloud computing during the past few years, users increasingly rely on networked applications that are deployed in the cloud. In particular, new applications will emerge where user interactions will be based on real-time continuous media streams instead of the traditional request-response types of interfaces. Furthermore, many of these applications will be multi-user streaming media based interactions instead of a single user interaction with an application. In this paper, we propose a geographic location-aware, hybrid, scalable cloud assisted peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture to support such applications that targets low administration cost, reduced bandwidth consumption, low latency, low initial investment cost and optimized resource usage. The main objective is to develop an efficient media delivery system that leverages locality. We propose a 3-layer novel architecture that uses at the core the cloud for application management, 2-tier edge cloud for supporting geo-dispersed user groups, and at the lowest level peer-to-peer dynamic overlays for locally clustered user groups. The proposed architecture manages multiple streaming sessions simultaneously and each streaming session is an independent entity. Our experiments on PlanetLab show that the dynamic construction and maintenance of delivering streams at both the user-level P2P overlay and edge cloud are indeed feasible and effective.