Exploring the optimal replication strategy in P2P-VoD systems: Characterization and evaluation

Content providers of P2P-Video-on-Demand (P2P-VoD) services aim to provide a high quality, scalable service to users, and at the same time, operate the system with a manageable operating cost. Given the volume-based charging model by ISPs, it is to the best interest of the P2P-VoD content providers to reduce peers´ access to the content server so as to reduce the operating cost. In this paper, we address an important open problem: what is the “optimal replication ratio” in a P2P-VoD system such that peers will receive service from each other and at the same time, reduce the traffic to the content server. We address two fundamental problems: (1) what is the optimal replication ratio of a movie given its popularity, and (2) how to achieve the optimal ratios in a distributed and dynamic fashion. We formally show how movie popularities can impact server´s workload, and formulate the video replication as an optimization problem. We show that the conventional wisdom of using the proportional replication strategy is non-optimal, and expand the design space to both passive replacement policy and active push policy to achieve the optimal replication ratios. We consider practical implementation issues, evaluate the performance of P2P-VoD systems and show that our algorithms can greatly reduce server´s workload and improve streaming quality.