A Cost-Effective Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Large-Scale On-Demand Media Streaming

This paper presents a cost-effective peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture for large-scale on-demand media streaming, named BitVampire. BitVampire’s primary design goal is to aggregate peers’ storage and upstream bandwidth to facilitate on-demand media streaming. To achieve this goal, BitVampire splits published videos into segments and distributes them to different peers. When a peer (or a receiver) wants to watch a video, it (i) searches the corresponding segments, then (ii) selfishly determines the best subset of supplying peers and (iii) aggregates bandwidth from these peers to stream the media content. In BitVampire, participating peers help each other to get the desired media content, thus powerful servers/proxies are not necessary, which makes it a cost-effective approach. To demonstrate the effectiveness of BitVampire, we conducted extensive simulation on large, hierarchical, Internet-like topologies. We also implemented a functional prototype using Java and Java Media Framework (JMF) to demonstrate the feasibility of BitVampire.