Network friendly video distribution

The rise of popularity of video streaming services has resulted in increased volumes of network traffic, which in turn have created Internet bottlenecks leading to perceived quality degradations. In this paper, we argue that a good way to tackle this type of congestion is to make the contents available inside ISPs´ networks. We thus propose a network-friendly content delivery architecture that considers the complex video distribution chain and its associated business models. This comprehensive architecture allows a network operator to fully engineer video traffic distribution in order to both alleviate peering links´ workload and improve delivered QoS. This proposal is fully compatible with Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABS) architectures, which are currently used to distribute video in the Internet. Extensive simulations show that the proposed architecture optimizes resources´ use while clearly improving the quality of experience by reducing peering links´ load and by shortening significantly the waiting time of clients. From an ISP´s point of view, such an architecture promises dramatic savings on the costs associated with video delivery. The feasibility of the architecture is proved by a prototype implementation based on DASH (“Dynamic Adaptative Streaming over HTTP”), which is the MPEG version of ABS. This architecture actually presents an evolutionary and pragmatic method to efficiently deploy an Information Centric Networking (ICN) architecture based on the collaboration between service providers or traditional CDNs and peer-assisted CDNs operated by ISPs.