Hybrid Architecture CDN/Peer-to-Peer for Live Video Distribution over the Internet

Abstract

With the spike of investment on Internet streaming services by the large multimedia conglomerates and the inherent preference of multimedia content over text-based by the users, video distribution is dominating the traffic over the Internet. Despite the audience record in live events and the desire of large media companies to increase the amount of online broadcasts, challenges related to scalability, economic costs and the quality of consumer’s experience of these transmissions are still an open issue. The work proposed in this paper makes use of modern technologies such as WebRTC and the HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) protocol to suggest that the use of a hybrid Peer-to-Peer/CDN model is able to relieve the amount of requests to video chunks on content servers, reducing transmission cost and, by using the distributed computing inherent to peer-to-peer systems, promote a better average video quality, user experience and system scalability.