Peer-assisted Content Delivery Network for Live Streaming: Architecture and Practice

This paper presents a hierarchical peer-assisted CDN architecture for live streaming, concerning the scalability of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and quality of the prosperous live streaming services. The meaning of Peer-assisted in our design is twofold: 1) a Peer-to-Peer(P2P) overlay on CDN data centers to accelerate stream piping among servers; and 2) P2P extended client regions conducted by corresponding edge servers for scalable streaming to clients. A system built according to this architecture has been deployed on ChinaCache, our partnering CDN. Results of practicing performance prove our design is able to achieve unprecedented scalability and high QoS for live streaming services of commercial CDNs.