CStream: Cloud based high performance video delivery network

Abstract

Live streaming and video-on demand are increasing at a rapid pace. Global Over-The-Top (OTT) video market is estimated to grow to 37.2 billion by 2017. However, live video streaming continues to suffer from high buffering ratios, high join times, high join failures and low average bit rates. The economic impact of these user experience metrics is huge. A recent white paper from Akamai states that 10-second delay in video streaming caused by startup time triggers over a 45% decline in viewership (and revenue). Recent studies have shown that traditional CDNs account for more than 20% of these join failure and bit rate degradation issues. In this paper, we present CSTREAM-a high performance cloud based live video delivery network. CSTREAM leverages the Cloud provider's global footprint, Cloud provider's high performance backbone network between different data centers, social media analytics and a UDP based fast data transfer protocol to optimize the quality of experience for end users, and the total cost incurred by the cloud provider in terms of network bandwidth and compute resources. CSTREAM allows a video broadcaster to be redirected to its closest publishing point (PP-hosted inside the closest Cloud data center), and then transfers the live stream at high speed using a UDP based fast protocol to one or more receiver side proxy (RSP) nodes (hosted on different Cloud data centers) worldwide, before being delivered to the eventual receiver devices. Our preliminary experiments indicate that CSTREAM can improve throughput and transfer times by up to 14 times for a transmission across the globe from San Jose to Hong Kong.