Multiple Streaming at the Network Edge

Streaming video over the Internet, including cellular networks, has now become commonplace. Network operators typically use multicasting or variations of multiple unicasting to deliver streams to the user terminal in a controlled fashion. An emerging alternative is P2P streaming, which is theoretically more scalable but suffers from other issues arising from the dynamic nature of the system. User´s terminals become streaming nodes but these are not constantly connected. Another issue is that they are based on logical overlays, which are not optimized for the physical underlay infrastructure. An important proposition is that of finding effective ways to increase the resilience of the overlay whilst at the same time not conflicting with the network. In this article we look at the combination of two techniques, multi-streaming (redundancy) and locality (network efficiency) in the context of both live and video-on-demand streaming. We introduce a new technique and assess it via a comparative, simulation-based study. We find that redundancy affects network utilization only marginally if traffic is kept at the edges via localization techniques.