Understanding and Supporting Live and On-Demand Streaming Service

Despite the popularity of streaming applications over Internet, little is known about its practical properties which could be potentially exploited to guide the system design of next generation peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. In this paper, we hence investigate the problem of understanding and supporting the two types of dominant streaming services - live broadcasting and on-demand streaming - with high service availability and system scalability. We make a measurement study to traditional but popular client/server (C/S) systems to reveal many fundamental and interesting observations with the benefit of totally more than 30,000,000 real workload traces. The anatomy particularly focuses on request and popularity issues which play a vital role to the system performance and also characterize evolutional user behaviors in the service community. The inherent request characteristics in live broadcasting service and drawbacks of classical cache-and-relay (CR) scheme in on-demand streaming further motivate us to discuss essential challenges and open questions in the context of supporting the two services over P2P networks.