SmoothCache 2.0: CDN-quality adaptive HTTP live streaming on peer-to-peer overlays

Abstract

In recent years, adaptive HTTP streaming protocols have become the de-facto standard in the industry for the distribution of live and video-on-demand content over the Internet. This paper presents SmoothCache 2.0, a distributed cache platform for adaptive HTTP live streaming content based on peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays. The contribution of this work is twofold. From a systems perspective, to the best of our knowledge, it is the only P2P platform which supports recent live streaming protocols based on HTTP as a transport and the concept of adaptive bitrate switching. From an algorithmic perspective, the system describes a novel set of overlay construction and prefetching techniques that realize: i) substantial savings in terms of the bandwidth load on the source of the stream, and ii) CDN-quality user experience in terms of playback latency and the watched bitrate. In order to support our claims, we conduct a methodical evaluation on thousands of real consumer machines.