PROSE: Proactive, Selective CDN Participation for P2P Streaming

Many production peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems use content delivery networks (CDN) to protect the user’s quality of experiences. Thus, how to efficiently utilize the capacity of CDN (e.g., which peers receive services from the CDN nodes) is a problem of practical significance. Existing solutions adopt a passive, on-demand approach, which is inefficient in utilizing CDN resources. In this paper, we propose PROSE, a simple, novel scheme to achieve proactive, selective CDN participation for P2P streaming. PROSE introduces novel concepts such as choke point expansion nodes/super nodes and leads to efficient, light-weighted, and distributed algorithms to identify and serve these nodes using CDN. Our experimental results show that PROSE achieves at least 10%~25% performance improvement and 2~4 times overhead reduction compared with existing general CDN-P2P-hybrid schemes.