Architecture for Cooperative Prefetching in P2P Video-on-Demand System

Most P2P VoD schemes focused on service architectures and overlays optimization without considering segments rarity and the performance of prefetching strategies. As a result, they cannot better support VCR-oriented service in heterogeneous environment having clients using free VCR controls. Despite the remarkable popularity in VoD systems, there exists no prior work that studies the performance gap between different prefetching strategies. In this paper, the authors analyze and understand the performance of different prefetching strategies. The analytical characterization brings one not only a better understanding of several fundamental tradeoffs in prefetching strategies, but also important insights on the design of P2P VoD system. On the basis of this analysis, they finally proposed a cooperative prefetching strategy called "Cooching".