Towards a streaming content delivery network

The distribution of multimedia streaming requires efficient management strategies in multisite environment with multiple senders and receivers. The intermediate nodes between senders and receivers act as the Streaming Routers (SR¹). They play an important role in the distribution of required contents by relaying and dropping video frames which depends on the network characteristics of peer receivers. In the highly changing network conditions, the SRs can leave or join the system anytime in the middle of stream transmission. In this scenario, it becomes a tedious task to manage the SRs when frequent switching of streaming sources occur. The coordination among streaming sources is also a challenging task. The emphasis of this work is to create the self-configured streaming system for the high quality streaming and highly unstable heterogeneous environment. The goal of self-configuration is to eliminate or minimize the configuration effort required by the system administrator. The application independent approach is taken so that various ranges of applications can be used without altering the system. We are conducting experiments over the PlanetLab. This paper describes an architectural design of a streaming content delivery network along with the experiments conducted on the PlanetLab testbed environment.