BitTube: Case Study of a Web-based Peer-Assisted Video-on-Demand (VoD) System

June 9, 2008
Yi Cui | Vanderbilt University

Recent theoretical and simulation-based studies have confirmed the tremendous benefit of peer-to-peer (P2P) communication at reducing the cost of running a VoD service. To date, very limited effort has been paid to validate the concept of peer-assisted VoD service, especially in terms of system implementation and service deployment. In this paper, we present the case study of a peer-assisted VoD system. We designed and developed BitTube, a BitTorrent-compliant VoD system. By combining client/server and P2P downloading, it supports seamless transition across the spectrum from pure client-server mode to BitTorrent mode. Within this framework, we experiment with a series of piece picking policies to enhance BitTube’s support to video streaming and promote locality-aware P2P downloading. We evaluate our system over PlanetLab, which hosts the user-side component of the BitTube system and emulates the global-scale user requests to the VoD service

Speaker Details

Dr. Yi Cui received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Since then, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, where he is currently an assistant professor. He has dozens of publications in the areas of overlay network, peer-to-peer system, and multimedia system, which he is working on actively. In 2007, he won the National Science Foundation Career Award “Achieving Self-Tunability of Peer-to-Peer Streaming Service through User-Level QoS Inference.”