Hybrid CDN-P2P architectures for live video streaming: Comparative study of connected and unconnected meshes

There are two main scalable methods for streaming live video over the Internet: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. Though both have their own problems, P2P streaming systems challenge delivering video with constant quality and CDNs approaches require deployment of large number of servers throughout the Internet that is costly. Recently, using hybrid architectures based on both CDN and P2P networks has shown to be an efficient approach for large-scale video distribution over the Internet. This paper is compared the performance of two main hybrid CDN-P2P architectures includes: (i) CDN-P2P unconnected mesh in which independent P2P mesh networks are constructed under each CDN node, and (ii) CDN-P2P connected mesh in which CDN nodes and peers participate in construction of a single P2P mesh network. The comparison is preformed in addition, to the pure mesh-based P2P video streaming, using extensive simulation and based on different QoS metrics.