A Hybrid CDN-P2P Architecture for Live Video Streaming

Abstract

Live streaming has the potential to generate huge amounts of traffic as its popularity with users increases. Most content providers have opted for direct distribution using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) even though low-cost delivery can be achieved using peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures. This paper presents a hybrid CDN-P2P architecture which consists of a tree-mesh P2P overlay structure to reduce the work load on the CDN. HTTP/2 is used to make use of the server push functionality to further reduce the delay and adaptive streaming is provided by using MPEG-DASH. The performance of the CDN-P2P model was evaluated, resulting in greatly reduced CDN bandwidth consumption when compared with the client-server model. Furthermore, a lower end-to-end delay (EED) was recorded when the proposed architecture was compared with two similar overlays.