Towards peer-assisted video on demand system: Building helpful overlays

Video related traffic has increased its presence on Internet and a significant portion of this traffic is comprised of YouTube-like videos. Content Distribution Networks have been used to deploy video related applications but these networks are unable to cope with video transmission demands per se. Thus, P2P assisted CDNs have been considered an alternative approach, capable of dealing with innate timing and content availability requirements of contemporary video related applications. However to realize its potential, this approach has to deal with effects of peers´ autonomy on overlay management. In this paper, we present a novel policy for managing a P2P overlay that assist CDNs on duties of distributing short videos. Experimental studies were carried out using real data collected from YouTube, most popular web site for short video distribution.