Assessing the Efficiency of Stream Reuse Techniques in Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand Systems.pdf

Assessing the Efficiency of Stream Reuse Techniques in Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand Systems Leonardo Bidese de Pinho and Claudio Luis de Amorim Parallel Computing Laboratory COPPE Systems Engineering Program Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil leopinho,amorim
@cos.ufrj.br Abstract Many works have reported simulated performance benefits of stream reuse techniques such as chaining, batching, and patching to the scalability of VoD systems. However, the relative contribution of such tech- niques have been rarely evaluated in practical implementations of scalable VoD servers. In this work, we investigate the efficiency of representative stream reuse techniques on the GloVE system, a low-cost scalable VoD platform whose resulting performance depends on the combination of the stream tech- niques it uses. More specifically, we evaluated performance of the GloVE system on delivering multiple 2-hour MPEG-1 videos to clients connected to the server through a 100 Mbps Ethernet switch, and ar- rival rates varying from 6 to 120 clients/min. We present experimental results including startup latency, occupancy of server’s channels, and aggregate bandwidth that GloVE demands for several combinations of stream reuse techniques. Overall, our results reveal that stream reuse techniques in isolation offer limited performance scalability to VoD systems and only balanced combination of chaining, batching, and patching explains the scalable performance of GloVE on delivering highly popular videos with low startup latency while using the smallest number of server’s channels. 1. Introduction In recent years, considerable research efforts have been concentrated on the design of scalable Video on Demand (VoD) systems since they represent a key-enabling technology for several classes of continuous media applications, such as distance learning and home entertainment. In particular, a central problem VoD designers face is that in a typical VoD System with many videos, even a tran