Selecting path-diversified servers in content distribution networks

Previous research has shown that multiple description coding (MDC) combined with path diversity provides robustness and error-resilience for media streaming applications. In this work, we address the research issue of how to achieve path diversity with the existence of content distribution networks (CDNs). We first define path diversity under the context of MDC-CDN. Then we design and evaluate several server selection schemes to achieve path diversity in CDNs. Our server selection scheme employs ping operations to obtain hop count information, and infers path structure through heuristics. The simulation experiment shows that our scheme has satisfactory performance and is highly adaptable to the network topology.