DistVid : an examination of a distributed video streaming system

Despite the recent popularity of P2P file sharing strategies, on-demand video streaming have traditionally employed client-server type architectures or else multi-cast trees as the principle methods for multimedia delivery. However, as one may suspect, such systems have difficulties associated with the enormous cost when attempting the scale the system upwards to supprt more users. In light of the recent popularity of sites such as YouTube and Revver, a system that better utilizes existing infrastructure would be preferable. This thesis presents DistVid, a new protocol that was developed to combine the features of multi-cast trees and structured P2P overlays. The overall goal of this protocol is to provide a frame work for on-demand video streaming that is both resilient to failure and able to maximize available bandwidth. The work presented here will show that DistVid not only achieves this, but can also be employed to increase the efficiency of existing client-server systems or else replace them entirely.