Global 1-Mbps Peer-Assisted Streaming: Fine-Grain Measurement of a Configurable Platform

Abstract

High-resolution video is defining a new age of peer-assisted video streaming over the public Internet. Streaming over 1-Mbps videos in a scalable and global manner presents a challenging milestone. In this work, we examine the feasibility of 1-Mbps streaming through a global measurement study. In contrast to previous measurement studies that crawl commercial applications, we conduct fine-grain, controlled experiments on a configurable platform. We developed and deployed FastMesh-SIM, a novel peer-assisted streaming system that leverages proxies, scalable streaming trees and IP multicast to achieve 1-Mbps streaming at a global scale. With the configurability-enabled design, we are allowed to conduct controlled experiments by varying design decisions under a wide range of operating conditions, and measuring in-depth, finegrain metrics at a per-hop, per-segment level. We collected hundreds of hours of streaming traces that broadcast live TV channels to more than 120 peers and 30 proxies, with a global geographic footprint over 8 different countries. Data analysis demonstrates how a set of design decisions collectively overcome the 1-Mbps barrier. The various operational issues we uncovered provide insights to service providers that want to deploy a commercial system at a larger scale and a higher streaming rate. By comparing theory and practice, we also confirm theory-inspired architectural decisions, and show that our system indeed achieves throughputs close to theoretical upper-bound calculated under many ideal assumptions.