DHT Based Collaborative Multimedia Streaming and Caching Service

Multimedia streaming and video on demand (VoD) services are among those hottest applications over the Internet. Traditional client/server pattern is stumbled due to the lack of scalability and limitation of service capacity. Peer-to-peer paradigm has been introduced to solve these issues. The key idea is that peers not only receive multimedia stream but also serve multimedia data to others. In this paper, we present a novel scheme that builds a multimedia streaming and caching service on a distributed hash table (DHT) based overlay. We adopt DHT to establish a decentralized caching service. The location information of cached segments is distributed among different peers and the information about segments from the same video is organized into an application-level multicast group. We also propose a cache replace algorithm on each peer. In our simulation, our design achieves good scalability with a low service reject rate. Besides, good load balance is also achieved as well as desired quality-of-service.