An adaptive hybrid CDN/P2P solution for content delivery networks

Streaming services have grown rapidly in the last few years and providers of video on-demand, such as Netflix or YouTube, are increasing the number of users even more quickly. The majority of these companies implement their services using huge Content Delivery Networks that are as much powerful as expensive, e.g. Amazon and Akamai. In this paper we propose a hybrid CDN/P2P solution that aims at reducing the infrastructural costs exploiting local caching and P2P while guaranteeing an optimal quality of service. The proposed architecture uses a classic CDN complemented by a geographically distributed layer where P2P can be activated exploiting network, content awareness and locality. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated by means of a prototype implementation that has been deployed using the PlanetLab network and the Amazon AWS cloud services. Our findings show that the proposed approach provides adaptive, flexible, scalable and content centric service to the end users while significantly reducing the infrastructural costs.