A CDN-P2P Hybrid Architecture with Location/Content Awareness for Live Streaming Services

The hybrid architecture of content delivery networks (CDN) and peer-to-peer overlay networks (P2P) is a promising technology enables effective real-time streaming services. It complements the advantages of quality control and reliability in a CDN, and the scalability of a P2P system. With real-time streaming services, however, high connection setup and media delivery latency are becoming the critical issues in deploying the CDN-P2P system. These issues result from biased peer selection without location awareness or content awareness, and can lead to significant service disruption. To reduce service disruption latency, we propose a group-based CDN-P2P hybrid architecture (iCDN-P2P) with a location/content-aware selection of peers. Specifically, a SuperPeer network makes a location-aware peer selection by employing a content addressable network (CAN) to distribute channel information. It also manages peers with content awareness, forming a group of peers with the same channel as the sub-overlay. Through a performance evaluation, we show that the proposed architecture outperforms the original CDN-P2P hybrid architecture in terms of connection setup delay and media delivery time.