Cost-effective capacity migration of Peer-to-Peer social media to clouds

Social media streaming has become one of the most popular applications over the Internet. We have witnessed the successful deployment of commercial systems with CDN (Content Delivery Network)- based engines, but they suffer from excessive costs for deploying dedicated servers. And with the further expansions on network traffic of social media streaming, a cost-effective solution remains an illusive goal. The emergence of cloud computing sets out to meet the challenge by dynamically leasing cloud servers. This paper aims to realize the capacity migration of social media systems to clouds at the reduced cost. Firstly, by lowering the capacity requested from clouds to reduce the capacity migration cost. Based on the crawled data from YouTube which is the most representative online social media, we find that with larger than 90% probability, the YouTube user’s all requested videos are within three hops of related videos. Then the three hops of related videos are regarded as a cluster and a user’s request can be partly satisfied by other users who watch videos in the same cluster to lessen the capacity requested from clouds. Therefore the capacity migration for clusters is under the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) paradigm and a cloud-assisted P2P social media system is proposed. Secondly, given the diverse capacities, cost, limited lease size of cloud servers, we formulate an optimization problem about how to lease cloud servers to minimize the leasing cost and a heuristic solution is presented. The evaluation based on the crawled data from a cluster of YouTube videos shows the efficiency of the proposed schemes.