A Multi-Level P2P Architecture for Video-on-Demand Systems

This paper proposes a new multi-level P2P architecture for video-on-demand(VOD) systems. It reserves the media data server of the client-server architecture and follows the P2P transmission and data sharing rule of the conventional P2P architecture. So the advantages of the client-server and conventional P2P architectures are combined in our new architecture. The multi-level P2P system is comprised of a wide area P2P network and multiple local area P2P networks. In such systems, media data are stored not only on data servers, but also on user nodes which can simultaneously supply data to peer nodes during receiving data and playing video. This architecture greatly enhances service capacity, efficiently reduces the burden of media data servers, reliably guarantees VOD QoS, and owns good scalability. A prototype multi-level P2P VOD system has been built and experiment results confirm the superiority of the new multi-level P2P architecture.