Loopback: Exploiting Collaborative Clients for Large-Scale Streaming

We propose a “loopback” approach in a two-level streaming architecture to exploit collaborative client/proxy buffers for improving the quality and efficiency of large-scale streaming applications. At the upper level we use a wide-area overlay network to deliver videos from a central server to proxy servers, at the lower level a proxy server delivers videos to clients with the help of collaborative caches. In particular, a proxy server and its clients in a local domain cache different portions of a video and form delivery loops. In each loop, a single video stream is originated from the proxy, passed through a number of clients, and passed back to the proxy. As a result, with limited bandwidth and storage space contributed by collaborative clients, we are able to significantly reduce the requirements of network bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, and cache space of a proxy. Furthermore, we develop local-repair schemes to address the client failure issue for enhancing server quality and eliminating most repairing load at severs. For popular videos, our local-repair schemes are able to handle most of single-client failures without service disruption and retransmissions from a central server. Our analysis and simulations have shown the efficacy of loopback.

People

Yingfei Dong, University of Hawaii

David Du, University of Minnesota

Ewa Kusmierek, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

Publication

“Loopback: Exploiting Collaborative Clients for Large-Scale Streaming,” in Proc. of ACM/SPIE Conference on Electronic Image/Multimedia Computing and Networking 2005 (MMCN 2005), Jan. 2005. A journal version is available.