Fueled by the growth of ultrahigh definition videos and Internet-capable portable devices, soaring video traffic is consuming massive amounts of network bandwidth.
To alleviate traffic and improve service, researchers are turning to edge devices, offering users cash rewards to contribute their available storage and upload bandwidth to distribute video content to other users.
They call it a crowdsourced content delivery network, or crowdsourced CDN.
In their article “Beyond 1 Million Nodes: A Crowdsourced Video Content Delivery Network” from the July-September 2017 issue of IEEE MultiMedia, researchers from Tsinghua University envision a crowdsourced CDN and propose a set of practical strategies to guide the implementation of this new paradigm. (Login may be required for full text.)
They perform a large-scale measurement to explore the popularity of geocontent. They then design solutions for the system’s operation, including regional content popularity prediction, region partition, and collaborative content replication.
In addition, they propose an auction mechanism to cope with resource competition among multiple content providers, and they demonstrate the performance gain of the design using data-driven simulation.
About Lori Cameron
Lori Cameron is a Senior Writer for the IEEE Computer Society and currently writes regular features for Computer magazine, Computing Edge, and the Computing Now and Magazine Roundup websites. Contact her at l.cameron@computer.org. Follow her on LinkedIn.
