Analysis of a CDN–P2P hybrid architecture for cost-effective streaming media distribution

To distribute video and audio data in real-time streaming mode, two different technologies – Content Distribution Network (CDN) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) – have been proposed. However, both technologies have their own limitations: CDN servers are expensive to deploy and maintain, and consequently incur a cost for media providers and/or clients for server capacity reservation. On the other hand, a P2P-based architecture requires sufficient number of seed supplying peers to jumpstart the distribution process. Compared with a CDN server, a peer usually offers much lower out-bound streaming rate and hence multiple peers must jointly stream a media data to a requesting peer. Furthermore, it is not clear how to determine how much a peer should contribute back to the system after receiving the media data, in order to sustain the overall media distribution capacity.