Optimal Replica Distribution in Edge-Node-Assisted Cloud-P2P Platforms for Real-Time Streaming

In recent years, there have been a number of large-scale deployments of P2P real-time streaming platforms in cloud storage systems due to their fast and convenient storage services for platform designers. Note that providing real-time streaming services for a platform is costly because of heavy bandwidth consumption from the platform to end-users. To cope with the above issue, our idea is to exploit the upload bandwidth of volunteers, namely, edge or fog nodes, to form an edge-node-assisted real-time streaming P2P platform. Specifically, according to designed strategies, the cloud distributes chunk replicas to edge nodes that can respond to end-user requests, and the public cloud supplements end-user demands only when the edge nodes cannot accommodate them. One of the important issues while introducing edge nodes into the system is how to utilize their resources efficiently. However, mainly due to the heterogeneous upload capacity of edge nodes and uneven request rates for different streaming chunks, the replica utilization at the edge nodes is diverse for different replica distribution strategies. Likewise bandwidth consumption in the public cloud varies correspondingly. Thus, this paper describes a mathematical model of the proposed replica distribution and designs an optimal algorithm for distributing chunk replicas. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposal.