A Dynamic Skip List-Based Overlay for On-Demand Media Streaming with VCR Interactions

Media distribution through application-layer overlay networks has received considerable attention recently, owing to its flexible and readily deployable nature. On-demand streaming with asynchronous requests, and in general, with VCR-like interactions, nevertheless remains a challenging task in overlay networks. In this paper, we introduce the Dynamic Skip List (DSL), a novel randomized and distributed structure with inherent ability to accommodate dynamic and asynchronous clients. We establish the theoretical foundations of the DSL and demonstrate a practical DSL-based streaming overlay. In this overlay, the costs for typical operations, including join, leave, fastforward, rewind, and random-seek are all sub-linear to the client population. The model also seamlessly integrates a fast data scheduling algorithm using linear network coding, yielding fast and robust downloading from multiple suppliers. Our simulation results show that the DSL-based overlay delivers reasonably smooth playb...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Dan Wang, Jiangchuan Liu
• Keywords: Application-layer Overlay Networks, DSL-based Streaming Overlay, Overlay Networks, TPDS 2008