Joint multi-CDN and LT-coding for video transport over HTTP

Video transport over HTTP is becoming more and more popular. Many video service providers construct huge content distribution networks(CDN) to support HTTP streaming service, however, they seldom exploit the benefits of multiple servers to achieve higher bandwidth and reliability by parallel streaming. In this paper, we study the problem of jointing multi-CDN and LT-coding for video transport over HTTP. Using LT coding, a client could download the same video segment from multiple servers without considering data segmentation and server scheduling issue. Thus, we are able to treat all CDN servers as a virtual server with higher bandwidth and reliability. To reduce the ACK overhead, a stochastic model is designed to predict the amount of data to be sent from each server while guaranteeing the decoding probability. Compared with the existing schemes, the experimental results show that our proposed scheme obtains less overhead and fewer number of HTTP requests. Besides, we also achieve better video quality and better robustness to fluctuant bandwidth.