A segmentation-based fine-grained peer sharing technique for delivering large media files in content distribution networks

Delivering large media files over the Internet is a challenging task because it has some unique features that are different from delivering conventional Web documents. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained peer sharing technique for dealing with the problem in the context of content distribution networks. The key difference of the technique from conventional peer-to-peer systems is that the unit of peer sharing is not a complete media file, but at a finer granularity. By doing so, we improve the flexibility of replica servers for handling client requests. We analyze the storage requirement at replica servers and design a scheduling algorithm to coordinate the delivery process from multiple replica servers to a client. Our simulations show that the fine-grained peer sharing approach can reduce the initial latency of clients and the rejection rate of the system significantly over a simple peer sharing method.