Collaborative ISP-CP Live Streaming

When a content provider (CP) provides peer-to-peer live streaming service, routing decisions based on the knowledge of underlay traffic could lead to much better performance (such as user delay). On the other hand, if the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide underlay traffic information to the CP, their overall network cost due to routing inefficiencies could be reduced. There is hence incentive for ISP-CP collaboration. In this paper, we study protocol design and cost-delay trade-off for such collaboration. We consider two ways of collaboration: one on complete information sharing (the case of ISPs playing the role of CP), and the other one on limited information sharing by means of peer ranking (the case of P4P framework through Oracle/iTracker). We first formulate the problem of minimizing network cost subject to a certain delay target, and show that it is NP-hard. For complete information sharing, we propose a centralized heuristic which achieves low network cost given a delay target. For limited information sharing, we present a simple distributed algorithm called Coppice (Collaborative ISP-CP live streaming service). Simulation results show that indeed there is a strong benefit for ISP-CP collaboration, and substantial performance can be gained if ISPs could share network information with CP.