SMART PRE-FETCHING FOR PEER ASSISTED ON-DEMAND MEDIA

摘要

A “Media Sharer” operates within peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to provide a dynamic peer-driven system for streaming high quality multimedia content, such as a video-on-demand (VoD) service, to participating peers while minimizing server bandwidth requirements. In general, the Media Sharer provides a peer-assisted framework wherein participating peers assist the server in delivering on-demand media content to other peers. Participating peers cooperate to provide at least the same quality media delivery service as a pure server-client media distribution. However, given this peer cooperation, many more peers can be served with relatively little increase in server bandwidth requirements. Further, each peer limits its assistance to redistributing only portions of the media content that it also receiving. Peer upload bandwidth for redistribution is determined as a function of surplus peer upload capacity and content need of neighboring peers, with earlier arriving peers uploading content to later arriving peers.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented process, comprising:
identifying relative times when each of two or more peers in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network requested streaming of a common media file; directing streaming of media packets of the requested media file to each peer to enable streaming playback of the media file for each peer at different times corresponding to the relative request times from a combination of:
server transmission of streaming packets to one or more of the peers, andallocation of a first portion of an available upload bandwidth capacity of each peer to transmit one or more received streaming media packets to one or more other peers that requested streaming of the common media file at a later relative request time; and periodically directing one or more of the peers to allocate a second portion of its available upload bandwidth to transmit additional packets of the common media file to one or more of the peers that requested the common media file at later relative request times.