A Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-Enabled Transcoding Framework for Blockchain-Based Video Streaming

Abstract

Blockchain technology is reshaping the video streaming industry by changing how humans create, distribute and consume videos. Leveraging blockchain technology, some emerging video streaming platforms aim to eliminate the centralized video streaming servers by building peer-to-peer content distribution architectures and cryptocurrency-based payment systems. On these blockchain-based platforms, the source video streams are required to be transcoded into multiple versions to meet heterogeneous user demands, which is a computationally intensive and energy consuming process. Meanwhile, the block size of the blockchain has significant impacts on the performance of blockchain-based video streaming systems. In this article, we propose a novel MEC-enabled transcoding framework for blockchain-based video streaming while an adaptive block size scheme is designed for the underlying blockchains. The system architecture of the proposed framework is presented to enable coordination of different aspects. Then we address the video transcoding and block size issues by using the ADMM method, and smart contract is used to facilitate distributed optimization among non-trusting entities. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.