CoreCast: How core/edge separation can help improving inter-domain live streaming

The rapid growth of broadband access has popularized multimedia services, which nowadays contribute to a large part of Internet traffic. Among this content, the broadcasting of live events requires streaming from a single source to a large set of users. For such content, network-layer multicast is the most efficient solution, but it has not found wide-spread adoption due to its high deployment cost. As a result, several application-layer solutions have been proposed based on large-scale P2P systems. These solutions however, are unable to provide a satisfactory quality of experience to all users, mainly because of the variability of the peers and their limited upload capacity. In this paper we advocate for a network-layer solution that circumvents the prohibitive deployment costs of previous approaches, taking advantage of the rare window of opportunity offered by the locator/identifier separation protocol (LISP). This new architecture, motivated by the alarming growth rate of the default-free zone (DFZ) routing table, is developed within the IETF, and aims to upgrade the current inter-domain routing system. We present CoreCast, an efficient inter-domain live streaming architecture operating on top of LISP. LISP involves upgrading some Internet routers and our proposal can be introduced along with these new deployments. To evaluate its feasibility in terms of processing overhead in networking equipment we have implemented CoreCast in the Linux kernel. Further, we compare the performance of CoreCast to the popular P2P streaming services both analytically and experimentally. The results show that CoreCast reduces inter-domain bandwidth consumption and that introduces negligible processing overhead in network equipment.