On-demand Television combined with non-real-time Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery for Television Content Providers

Sammanfattning: With the expansion of the Internet and an increasing fraction of consumers having broadband connections, more and more content is finding its way on-line. Video content is becoming one of the most popular types of media content on the Internet. Traditional media content providers, such as television networks, are placing their content on the Internet in order to gain a broader audience. On-demand websites such as kanal5play.se allow viewers to view the multimedia content they want at the time of their choice. While this gives viewers flexibility in their viewing, it creates resource problems for content providers. Statistics from Kanal5 AB show that, even with individual viewers requesting content when they want, there are still patterns in which multiple viewers watch the same content at the same time. This means there are correlations in the demand for content. With unicast distribution this leads to spikes in requirements for bandwidth to the viewers. These peaks lead to high costs for network and server resources to deliver the requested content, but these resources have low average utilization. This thesis project investigates how a content provider can make use of each viewer’s own resources to deliver content to other users using peer-to-peer techniques. The thesis evaluates what methods can be used in order to reduce the content provider’s resource requirements during peak hours by exploiting copies of contents that have already been delivered to viewers who requested this same content earlier. A prototype was made to evaluate the suggested design using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI), which is built on top of the Transfer Control Protocol (TCP). Experiments show that an initial delay of several seconds is reached on a network with a simulated delay of 100ms, while a minimal initial delay was observed on a network with low delay, i.e. ideal conditions. The throughput results of the prototype show that the suggested solution is adequate for delivering on-demand content supplied by Kanal5 AB. However, the relatively poor startup performance of this solution argues for tuning the application to better work with the TCP protocol or to utilize another transport protocol - especially if the round-trip delay is large as TCP’s 3-way handshake and flow control algorithm limit the performance of the prototype system.