Improving Medium-Sized Media Clip Distribution Through Transparent Tail Synchronization

The emergence of popular video sharing sites such as YouTube has created a tremendous content shift towards timely, medium-sized media together with placing significant demands on the network. While techniques such as Application Layer Multicast and P2P streaming offer the potential to reduce the impact of general streaming content, the difficulty in imposing synchronization and the heavy asymmetry of clients nullify the majority of the respective benefits of the techniques. In this paper, the authors propose a method, transparent tail synchronization that discovers latent opportunities for synchronization from the tail of the content to take advantage of efficient distribution techniques.