Large-Scale Peer-Assisted Online Hosting, Distribution and Video Streaming Systems

Large-scale peer-assisted content distribution systems within the cloud of the Internet have provided valuable services to a large population of end users, ranging from file sharing, live video streaming, to video-on-demand (VoD). Great attention from both academia and the industry has been paid to this area. With users not only downloading data but also uploading data to one another, such peer-assisted systems are easy to deploy and have good scalability. However, due to the highly dynamic nature of distributed peers with heterogeneous capacities and diverse behaviors, there still remain several fundamental challenges in large-scale peer-assisted content distribution and video streaming systems, with respect to the cost-performance trade-off in peer-assisted online hosting and distribution, and the flash crowd problem in P2P live streaming, as well as the service qualities of peer-assisted VoD. This book seeks to address these challenges through not just mathematical modeling and analysis, but also practical system design and measurement, in order to bridge theory and practice.