MegaDrop: A Cooperative Video-on-Demand System in a Peer-to-Peer Environment

In a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) environm ent, which can improve scalability and lessen bandwidth waste, the load of the Video- on-demand (VoD) services can be distributed to reduce the burden on centralized video server s and maximize the bandwidth utilization. Conventional P2P techniques for VoD services only consider data between active peer s in the same VoD session. The inactive peers that leave the session but still hold some of the media content in their local storage are ignored. In this article, we design and implement a fully decentralized VoD service via P2P techniques, which is referred to as the MegaDrop system. The MegaDrop system not only takes active peers into consideration but also provides mechanisms for discovering inactive peers that contain desired media objects. Evaluation results of the MegaDrop system show that our architecture performs more efficiently when the more inactive peers involving to provide media blocks.