Placement of continuous media in wireless peer-to-peer networks

This paper investigates a novel streaming architecture consisting of home-to-home online (H2O) devices that collaborate with one another to provide on-demand access to large repositories of continuous media such as audio and video clips. An H2O device is configured with a high bandwidth wireless communication component, a powerful processor, and gigabytes of storage. A key challenge of this environment is how to place data across H2O devices in order to enhance startup latency, defined as the delay observed from when a user requests a clip, to the onset of its display. Our primary contribution is a novel replication technique that enhances startup latency, while minimizing the total storage space required from an environment consisting of N H2O devices. This technique is based on the following intuition: The first few blocks of a clip are required more urgently than its last few blocks, and should be replicated more frequently in order to minimize startup latency. We develop analytical models to quantify the number of replicas required for each block. In addition, we describe two alternative distributed implementation of our replication strategy. When compared with full replication, our technique provides on average greater than 97% (i.e., several orders of magnitude) savings in storage space, while ensuring zero startup latency and a hiccup-free reception.