B3 - Server-less Video Streaming System

Video streaming systems have traditionally been built around the client-server architecture where a video server stores compressed video for delivery to clients connected to a network. With increasing demand for large-scale video streaming services, researchers have spent considerable effort in designing high-capacity video servers. Nevertheless, a video server can only have finite capacity and the continuous server upgrade can become increasingly more expensive as the system scales up. In this research programme, we investigate a radically different architecture where the bottleneck - video server, is eliminated altogether. This server-less architecture exploits resources in the end-user machines for distributed data storage and video delivery. Thus when new hosts are added to the system, they add resources in addition to workload to the system. This novel server-less architecture will open a new way to building scalable, reliable, and cost-effective distributed systems for the future Internet.

Applications

• Continuous-media streaming such as video-on-demand
• Distributed multimedia digital library

Features

• Eliminate the need for expensive video servers
• Reduce network traffic over costly long-distance backbone networks
• Inherently scalable
• More reliable than dedicated high-end video servers

Principal Investigator
Prof. Y. B. Lee
Department of Information Engineering