ISP-friendly peer-assisted on-demand streaming of long duration content in BBC iPlayer

Abstract

In search of scalable solutions, CDNs are exploring P2P support. However, the benefits of peer assistance can be limited by various obstacle factors such as ISP friendlinessrequiring peers to be within the same ISP, bitrate stratificationthe need to match peers with others needing similar bitrate, and partial participation-some peers choosing not to redistribute content.This work relates potential gains from peer assistance to the average number of users in a swarm, its capacity, and empirically studies the effects of these obstacle factors at scale, using a monthlong trace of over 2 million users in London accessing BBC shows online. Results indicate that even when P2P swarms are localised within ISPs, up to 88% of traffic can be saved. Surprisingly, bitrate stratification results in 2 large sub-swarms and does not significantly affect savings. However, partial participation, and the need for a minimum swarm size do affect gains. We investigate improvements to gain from increasing content availability through two well-studied techniques: content bundlingcombining multiple items to increase availability, and historical caching of previously watched items. Bundling proves ineffective as increased server traffic from larger bundles outweighs benefits of availability, but simple caching can considerably boost traffic gains from peer assistance.

Consume Local: Towards Carbon Free Content Delivery

“…The advantage of peer-assistance lies in the fact that peer-topeer networks are innately self-sustainable because every new user contributes an upload capacity comparable to what she has consumed from the network -a self-sustainable content swarm is able to serve most of the users' requests from fellow peers, thereby offloading traffic from content servers. Indeed, Zhao et al reports traffic savings of 70-80% in Akamai NetSession [39], and similar savings have been also suggested for BBC iPlayer (up to 88%) [18] and Conviva platform (up to 87%) [3].…”

“…), thus, measuring energy consumption as a function of the instantaneous demand. We adopted the more detailed per-bit approach in the current study because the per-session granularity of the data records we possess allows us to make fine-grain estimations of traffic demands rather than doing coarse-grain measurements based on the number of subscriptions, and also because per-user consumption patterns are highly skewed towards a small share of very active users [18]. We build on the widely used energy models of content delivery networks proposed by Valancius et al [34] and Baliga et al [6], adapting them for the peer-assisted content delivery scenario where traffic can either be delivered from active peers or from the CDN nodes if no peers are available.…”

“…In a broader context, peer-assisted content delivery has been thoroughly surveyed by Lu et al [23] and Anjum et al [2]. The main focus of this flow of papers lies in understanding traffic savings (rather than energy savings) via large-scale analysis of users' sessions in Akamai NetSession [13] [39], Conviva [3], BBC iPlayer [18], Kankan [38], Todou [22] and Spotify [11]. With respect to these previous works on understanding performance of peer-assistance, in this paper we focus on sustainability aspects of hybrid content delivery rather than traffic savings and consider both end-to-end greenness of peer-assistance as well as potential impact on individual users.…”

Facebook (A)Live?

“…This allows for a number of new lines of exploration, particularly relating to how live videos are created and consumed by social ties. There have been a small number of studies into live streaming platforms, including Akamai [28], BBC iPlayer [15][16][17]24] or CNLive [20]. These professional platforms serve a wide range of international and professional content, although we emphasise that this differs dramatically from the user generated content discussed above.…”

SCORE: Exploiting Global Broadcasts to Create Offline Personal Channels for On-Demand Access

“…While this makes the SCORE solution specific to catch-up TV/radio, it also makes the design straightforward. Recently, we have shown that peer-assisted CDNs can also be effective for catch-up TV [24].…”