A Distributed Index Service for Peer-to-Peer VOD

In a P2P media streaming system, a centralized tracker server is always used to maintain the topology. However, sometimes the server becomes overloaded when too many clients are coming. Then, the response time is too long because of many frequent VCR operations and the tracker server cannot support large-scale users´ requests. In this paper, a distributed tracker organization is designed to solve the problem. In the novel architecture, the index service makes each user get full related peers list, which are playing the same movie, from distributed trackers, not from one centralized tracker. The main problems of designing index services have been solved: how to maintain the peer´s playing information on distributed trackers; how to keep the trackers load balance and how to respond the searching request fast. In this paper, we have developed the novel architecture and evaluated the system performances. The experiment results show that this system can effectively enhance the whole service capacity of the platform.