Design of HD-quality Streaming Networks for Real-time Content Distribution

Abstract

Recent advances in storage and networking technology are rapidly changing users' TY viewing patterns. Personal video recorders (PVRs) enable people to watch what they want when they want by recording TV programs into local disks. In addition, PVRs can easily share TV contents over peer-to-peer networks once they are equipped with broadband connections. However, the current broadband bandwidth makes it difficult to support HD-quality TV content streaming on the Internet. In this paper, we propose a novel HD-quality streaming architecture for real-time broadcast content distribution. We develop two efficient scheduling schemes, matching a communication pair and switching/replication for system load-balancing, to further utilize network and disk bandwidth. We also evaluate buffer requirement to continue storing time-shifted programs without missing any broadcast data. By extensive simulation experiments, we show the effect of our proposed schemes and time-shifting policy.