First Mile in Crowdsourced Live Streaming
Haitian Pang, Zhi Wang, Chen Yan, Qinghua Ding, Lifeng Sun · 2017
Recent years have witnessed a rapid increase of crowdsourced live streaming (CLS): applications like Twitch.tv have attracted millions of daily active users. Content delivery in such crowdsourced live streaming involves two phases: 1) Video stream (i.e., a live channel) is generated and uploaded by a broadcaster user, and 2) The video stream is then delivered to many viewers choosing to watch the channel. Today's crowdsourced live streaming service usually employs conventional content delivery network (CDN) solutions to address the above content delivery problem, i.e., letting the broadcaster upload the video to a sinking CDN that then distributes the content to viewers. This solution causes a large delay and bandwidth insufficiency in the first mile between the broadcasters and the sinking CDN servers - our measurement study shows that the first-mile upload network quality causes a large portion of viewer rebuffers in the whole channel.