RingCast: A video-on-demand streaming architecture in P2P with Vivaldi

Realizing video-on-demand (VoD) streaming in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fashion is more challenging than in the case of live media streaming, since the VoD systems must have ability to deliver the whole video to the new user and have inherent dynamicity caused by frequent VCR and joining/leaving operations. In this paper, we propose a ring based overlay architecture to solve the problem, called RingCast, consisting of a structured multi rings and a near-preferential membership management protocol. In RingCast, each peer maintains a data-exchange ring to exchange data among suppliers and several other jump rings with exponentially increased radius to assist the quick relocation of VCR operations. To deal with suboptimal performance in terms of message latency because its overlay topology does not match the underlying physical network, we use the Vivaldi synthetic coordinate system to bias neighbor selection to favor nodes that are "close" in the Euclidean sense. Through comparison with another architecture RINDY, our simulation results show that RingCast saves more server bandwidth and achieves lower start-up latency when lots of users watch a same video simultaneously.