PartnerVoD: Improving P2P-VoD with Partnership Overlay

Recently video-on-demand (VoD) has become a popular Internet application due to its promising usage in a variety of Internet-based services. However, it remains a challenging problem to provide scalable and fluent VoD services over Internet especially when including VCR operations into VoD service. Supporting user interactivities such as random seek, rewind and fast forward is desirable while these operations surely introduce extra complexity and overhead into the VoD system. Moreover, users may probably have to wait for a long time because new data needs to be buffered and this would greatly deteriorate user experiences. In this paper, we propose an overlay-constructing method called PartnerVoD, aiming at maximizing the collaboration among peers and the utility of upload bandwidth. In PartnerVoD, peers with close playing positions become partners and stream media data to each other. In order to support fast streaming and efficient neighbor discovery, we not only takes advantage of P2P-VoD network´s hierarchical characteristic in time domain but also takes locality awareness into account. Additionally, performance evaluation shows that it can help improve VCR performance at the same time.