Impact of FTTH deployment on live streaming delivery systems

Abstract

Video contents are now dominant in the Internet traffic and more and more people watch Live streamed contents. Started with a simple client/server architecture, Live streaming is now evolving towards a CDN-based network or a P2P-based distribution. The evolution is expected to provide a better quality to end-users while reducing costs for the content providers. In parallel with the evolution of the architectures, the access networks of the customers are also evolving, in terms of link capacities. More and more people can have a high broadband access connection. This is linked to evolution of xDSL networks but also to the deployment of FTTH (Fiber To The Home) networks. With the FTTH deployment, the issue of the best delivery model is raised up. Started from the current situation in the France Telecom network, we forecasted a deployment of FTTH customers (5 to 25% of ADSL customers migrating to FTTH) and evaluated the network load as well as the cost for a network operator to provide a live streaming service to its customers, on various architectures: Centralised server, regional servers (operator CDN-like network), and both assisted with a national P2P network and with a regional P2P network (e.g. ALTO-like systems where local peers are preferred to remote peers). The results of our techno-economic assessment highlight the benefit of a P2P-based delivery system in relation with the deployment of FTTH, more visible in case of network-aware (regional) P2P.