An ID-based approach to the caching and distribution of peer-to-peer, proxy-based video content

The viewing of streamed video content has become second nature these days for many Internet users. With such copious amounts of data being transferred between hosts involved in this streaming, it is prudent to establish some method of effectively minimising the resultant outbound network traffic, whilst providing the client with a good Quality of Service (QoS). Although many approaches have attempted to address the aforementioned issues, most tend to focus on directly aiding the content provider, rather than the client and typically require a lookup mechanism, such as a distributed hash table (DHT), which engenders a storage and complexity overhead. In this paper we propose a novel infrastructure to the aim of enhancing QoS, whilst reducing outbound network traffic, for clients downloading YouTube video content. We achieve this without a reliance upon request flooding or large hash table overheads inherent to DHT systems. Augmenting this, we proffer two additional mechanisms, the first balances localised storage-peer (client) load and the second preemptively balances super-peer (proxy) load. Lastly, we provide a peer failure mechanism, which allows the proposed system to quickly and efficiently recover from peer failures. Results garnered from emulations indicate that the proposed architecture offers respectable cached video retrieval speeds, even under dynamic and high traffic conditions, thus precluding typical client video lag and/or buffering.