Toward P2P-Based Multimedia Sharing in User Generated Contents

Online forums have long since been the most popular platform for people to communicate and share ideas. Nowadays, with the boom of multimedia sharing, users tend to share more and more with their online peers within online communities such as forums. The server-client model of forums has been used since its creation in the mid-1990s. However, this model has begun to fall short in meeting the increasing need of bandwidth and storage resources as an increasing number of people share more and more multimedia content. In this work, we first investigate the unique properties of forums based on the data collected from the Disney discussion boards. According to these properties, we design a scheme to support P2P-based multimedia sharing in forums called Multimedia Board (MBoard). Extensive trace-driven simulation results utilizing real trace data show that MBoard can significantly reduce the load on the server while maintaining a high quality of service for the users.