Peer-Assisted VoD: Making Internet Video Distribution Cheap

We consider the design and potential benefits of peer-assisted video-on-demand, in which participating peers assist the server in delivering VoD content. The assistance is done in such a way that it provides the same user quality experience as pure client-server distribution. We focus on the single-video approach, whereby a peer only redistributes a video that it is currently watching. We first describe three natural prefetching policies for exploiting surplus peer upload capacity. We then study the performance of peer-assisted VoD using stochastic simulation and trace-driven simulation, with traces collected from the MSN Video service. The results of these simulations show that peer-assisted VoD, with the proper prefetching policy, can dramatically reduce server bandwidth costs.