Scaling Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand Systems Using Helpers

The throughput of Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems is typically capped by the users' aggregate upload bandwidth. The drastic increase in the popularity of VoD and the demand of higher quality content has thus placed substantial burden on the content servers. The authors investigate a novel P2P VoD architecture that leverages idle internet resources, which they call helpers, to provide a scalable solution to P2P VoD systems. Helpers are volatile in nature, and can be individually unreliable. However, they investigate the statistical aggregation of a large number of helpers to guarantee quality of service.