Understanding the design tradeoffs for cooperative streaming multicast
Animesh Nandi, Bobby Bhattacharjee, Peter Druschel · Max Planck Digital Library · 2009
Video streaming over the Internet is rapidly increasing in popularity, but the availability and quality of the content is limit ed by the high bandwidth cost for server-based solutions. Cooperative endsystem multicast (CEM) has emerged as a promising paradigm for content distribution in the Internet, because the bandwidt h overhead of disseminating content is shared among the participants of the CEM overlay network. Several CEM systems have been proposed and deployed, but the tradeoffs inherent in the differ ent designs are not well understood. In this work, we provide a common framework in which different CEM design choices can be empirically and systematically evaluated. Our results show that all CEM protocols are inherently limited in certain aspects of their performance. We distill our observations into a novel model that explains the inherent tradeoff s of CEM design choices and provides bounds on the practical performance limits of any future CEM protocol. In particular, the model conjectures that no CEM design can simultaneously achieve all three of low overhead, low lag, and high streaming quality.