A measurement study of the potential benefits for peer-assisted mobile VoD

Abstract

Rapid growth in users of smartphones and other mobile devices is increasing the demand for online video service to these mobile devices. The mobile video on demand (VoD) service is almost exclusively provided by content delivery network (CDN) servers since mobile devices are not powerful enough to provide any peer-to-peer (P2P) service. However, in a mixed VoD system with both non-mobile and mobile peers, an interesting question is to ask whether we can leverage non-mobile peers to provide better support for VoD. In this paper, we try to answer this question by a measurement study on Tencent's existing VoD systems. Our measurement results show various interesting characteristics and potential benefits of leveraging non-mobile users. Such results will guide us towards a practical system design and implementation in the near future.