A practical performance analysis of stream reuse techniques in peer-to-peer VoD systems

Abstract

Although many works have reported simulated performance benefits of stream reuse techniques to the scalability of VoD systems, these techniques have been rarely evaluated in practical implementations of scalable VoD servers. In this work we investigate the behavior of representative stream reuse techniques in the GloVE system, a low-cost VoD platform whose scalable performance depends on the combination of the stream techniques it uses. More specifically, we show experimental results focusing on the requirements of the amount of server's channels and aggregate bandwidth that GloVE demands for several combinations of stream reuse techniques. Overall, our results reveal that stream reuse techniques in isolation offer limited performance scalability to VoD systems and only balanced combinations of batching, chaining, and patching techniques explains the scalable performance of GloVE on delivering popular videos with low startup latency while using the smallest number of server's channels. © Springer-Verlag 2004.