BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Dissertation OPTIMIZING ON-DEMAND RESOURCE DEPLOYMENT FOR PEER-ASSISTED CONTENT DELIVERY by RAYMOND SWEHA

Increasingly, content delivery solutions leverage client resources in exchange for services in a peerto-peer (P2P) fashion. Such peer-assisted service paradigm promises significant infrastructure cost reduction, but suffers from the unpredictability associated with client resources, which is often exhibited as an imbalance between the contribution and consumption of resources by clients. This imbalance hinders the ability to guarantee a minimum service fidelity of these services to clients especially for applications where content has to be fresh and cannot be cached. In this thesis, we propose a novel architectural service model that enables the establishment of higher fidelity services through (1) coordinating the content delivery to efficiently utilize the available resources, and (2) leasing the least additional cloud resources, available through special nodes (angels) that join the service on-demand, and only if needed, to complement the scarce resources available through clients. While the proposed service model can be deployed in many settings, this thesis focuses on peer-assisted content delivery and routing applications, in which the scarce resource is typically the upstream capacity of clients. We target three applications that require the delivery of fresh as opposed to stale content. The first application is bulk-synchronous transfer, in which the goal of the system is to minimize the maximum distribution time – the time it takes to deliver the content to all clients in a group. The second application is live video streaming, in which the goal of the