Improving Media Services on P2P Networks - Internet Computing, IEEE

The Internet’s advent as the dominant application, content, and service delivery pipe set off a dramatic evolution among computing paradigms. The evolution continued as applications and services gradually migrated from client-server to edge services, and has now arrived at peer-to-peer (P2P) computing frameworks that can accommodate vast numbers of users. To comprehend this evolution’s impact, consider the great speed with which Napster amassed tens of millions of users, often with hundreds of thousands or even millions online concurrently at peak periods, while still maintaining acceptable service.1 No existing client-server-based content delivery infrastructures can match that scalability. Even edge services with multiple caching servers would be hard pressed to accommodate a fraction of the delivery capacity popular P2P services make possible. While distributed computing platform research usually focuses on platforms with roughly equivalent computing components, P2P computing emphasizes the heterogeneity in uptime, computing capabilities, and connectivity bandwidths between peers. This diversity will only increase as the infrastructure accommodates wireless connections and devices such as personal digital assistants, tablets, compact media players, and cell phones (see Table 1, next page). In this article, we present an architecture and resource management and adaptation framework that transcends existing infrastructures to accommodate and accelerate multimedia peer applications and services. We also propose key technology components that support seamless adaptation of resources to enhance quality of service and the building of better tools and applications that utilize the peer-computing network’s underlying power. As we’ll show, we have developed a prototype system that integrates the various components and sample applications that can be built on the proposed infrastructure.