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Design, Implementation, and Measurement of a Crowdsourcing-Based Content Distribution Platform

Published: 08 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Content distribution, especially the distribution of video content, unavoidably consumes bandwidth resources heavily. Internet content providers invest heavily in purchasing content distribution network (CDN) services. By deploying tens of thousands of edge servers close to end users, CDN companies are able to distribute content efficiently and effectively, but at considerable cost. Thus, it is of great importance to develop a new system that distributes content at a lower cost but comparable service quality. In lieu of expensive CDN systems, we implement a crowdsourcing-based content distribution system, Thunder Crystal, by renting bandwidth for content upload/download and storage for content cache from agents. This is a large-scale system with tens of thousands of agents, whose resources significantly amplify Thunder Crystal’s content distribution capacity. The involved agents are either from ordinary Internet users or enterprises. Monetary rewards are paid to agents based on their upload traffic so as to motivate them to keep contributing resources. As far as we know, this is a novel system that has not been studied or implemented before. This article introduces the design principles and implementation details before presenting the measurement study. In summary, with the help of agent devices, Thunder Crystal is able to reduce the content distribution cost by one half and amplify the content distribution capacity by 11 to 15 times.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 12, Issue 5s
Special Section on Multimedia Big Data: Networking and Special Section on Best Papers From ACM MMSYS/NOSSDAV 2015
December 2016
288 pages
ISSN:1551-6857
EISSN:1551-6865
DOI:10.1145/3001754
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 08 November 2016
Accepted: 01 July 2016
Revised: 01 May 2016
Received: 01 August 2015
Published in TOMM Volume 12, Issue 5s

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Author Tags

  1. CDN
  2. Crowdsourcing
  3. agent
  4. video distribution

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • Shenzhen Science and Technology Foundation
  • Foundation of Shenzhen City
  • Natural Science Foundation of China

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