Optimal Prefetching Scheme in P2P VoD Applications With Guided Seeks

Most existing Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems have been designed and optimized for the sequential playback. In practice, users often want to seek to the positions they are interested in. Such frequent seeks raise greater challenges to the design of the prefetching scheme. In this work, we first propose the concept of guided seeks. With the guidance, users can perform more efficient seeks to the desired positions. The guidance can be obtained from collective seeking statistics of other peers who have watched the same title in the previous and/or concurrent sessions. However, it is very challenging to aggregate the statistics efficiently, timely and in a completely distributed way. We design the hybrid sketches that not only capture the seeking statistics at significantly reduced space and time complexity, but also adapt to the popularity of the video. From the collected seeking statistics, we estimate the segment access probability, based on which we further develop an optimal prefetching scheme and an optimal cache replacement policy to minimize the expected seeking delay at every viewing position. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed prefetching framework significantly reduces the seeking delay compared to the sequential prefetching scheme.