Throughput driven, highly available streaming stored playback video service over a peer-to-peer network

Streaming video is a key functionality in Internet based services such as distant education, VoD etc. The high bandwidth requirements associated with such applications coupled with limited I/O bandwidth of the server limits the throughput levels achieved by these systems. Such systems can largely benefit if the abundant resources such as storage and bandwidth available at the end systems (otherwise called as peers) are put to use. Availability of streaming service is largely affected by the transient nature of the peers. Therefore, we identify two important issues in these systems, viz (i) scalability, (in terms of support large number of clients) (ii) high data availability (minimizing the loss of segments due to the transience of peers). In this paper we propose a throughput driven, highly available 'streaming stored video' service architecture over a peer-to-peer network. We use distributed caching scheme where the initial segments of data are temporarily cached and served to subsequent requests, thereby reducing the number of requests to the server. We exploit the inherent redundancy of FEC based channel coding to provide high availability. Our aim is to show that despite this high transience of peers, the proposed distributed caching scheme helps reduce the number of server streams requested and provide high data availability, while serving large community of clients. We describe our three-tier architecture to realize the proposed model and measure the potential of our scheme in terms of increase in overall system capacity.