A Survey on Large-scale Peer-assisted Content Distribution Network

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Large-scale Peer-assisted Content Distribution Network"

Mr. Fangming Liu


Abstract:

Large-scale peer-assisted content distribution systems within the "cloud" 
of the Internet have provided attractive services to a large population of 
end users, ranging from file sharing, live video streaming, and 
Video-on-Demand. Great attentions and efforts from both academic community 
and industry have been devoted into this area. With users not only 
downloading data but also uploading data to others, these systems are easy 
to deploy and have good scalability. However, due to a highly dynamic 
environment of autonomous users with heterogeneous capacities and 
different behaviors, there still remain several fundamental limitations of 
existing peer-assisted content distribution solutions. While server-based 
solutions such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) can offer better 
reliability and service quality, they incur expensive server bandwidth 
costs along with ever-increasing number of users. Nowadays, content 
distribution systems are evolving towards a seamless hybrid design of peer 
assistance and server provisioning to guarantee adequate levels of service 
quality while conserving substantial server capacity costs. In this 
report, we survey the state-of-the-art of large-scale peer-assisted 
content distribution applications (including file sharing, live video 
streaming, and Video-on-Demand), and discuss important challenges and 
research issues on both peer assistance and server provisioning aspects 
within the perspective of seamless hybrid design. Specifically, through 
identifying fundamental characteristics and challenges of different 
applications, we discuss pros and cons of existing approaches with 
representative systems. With these in mind, a number of open research 
issues are presented, which aim to achieve better system performance and 
service quality.


Date:     		Tuesday, 25 November 2008

Time: 			10:30a.m.-12:30p.m.

Venue: 			Room 3405
 			lifts 17-18


Committee Members:      Dr. Bo Li (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Zonghua Gu (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Ke Yi
 			Prof. Chin-Tau Lea (ECE)


**** ALL are Welcome ****