Towards peer-assisted dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP

This paper presents our peer-assisted Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (pDASH) proposal as well as an evaluation based on our DASH simulation environment in comparison to conventional approaches, i.e., non-peer-assisted DASH. Our approach maintains the standard conformance to MPEG-DASH enabling an easy and straightforward way of enhancing a streaming system with peer assistance to reduce the bandwidth and infrastructure requirements of the content/service provider. In anticipation of the results our system achieves a bandwidth reduction of Content Distribution Networks (CDN) and as a consequence the corresponding infrastructure costs of the content/service providers by up to 25% by leveraging the upstream capacity of neighboring peers. Furthermore, the cost savings have been evaluated using a cost model that is based on the current Amazon CloudFront pricing scheme. Furthermore, we have also evaluated the performance impact that various combinations of quality levels of the content could have in a peer-assisted streaming system as well as the client behavior in such an environment.