Distributed balancer of mobile nodes' bandwidth and battery resources in P2P VoD systems

Abstract

Video streaming is one of the most popular internet services and generates a large percentage of the global network traffic, especially among mobile users. As major video-ondemand (VoD) service providers have seen their bandwidth costs increase, a shift towards peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures has been made. Indeed a number of recent research efforts have focused on offloading media server using P2P architectures, however the battery management of the participating peers has not been sufficiently studied. Ignoring battery constraints in a P2P service that is dominated by mobile users can significantly deteriorate the system's efficiency and lead to low Quality of Experience (QoE) to all users. In this paper, we present a distributed P2P VoD system that successfully utilizes peers' upload bandwidth resources, while preserving their battery. Its components that manage the overlay and the data scheduling are tested under extensive simulations that show promising results.