Manageable peer-to-peer architecture for video-on-demand

An efficiently manageable overlay network architecture, called AIRVoD, is proposed for video-on-demand, based on a distributed-centralized P2P network. The system consists of distributed servers, peers, SuperNodes and sub-SuperNodes. The distributed central servers act as the centralized index server to store the peer list, program list, and buffer information of peers. Each newly joined peer in AIRVoD periodically exchanges data availability information with the central server. Some powerful peers are selected to be sub-SuperNodes which store a larger part of the demanded program. The demanding peers can retrieve correspondingly unavailable data from partners selected from the central server, sub-SuperNodes and SuperNodes that have the original programs to supply the available data, by using the proposed parallel scheduling algorithm. There are four characteristics of this architecture: 1) easy to globally balance and manage: central server can identify, and cluster each newly joined peer, and allocate the load in the whole peer network; 2) efficient for dynamic networks: data transmission is dynamically determined according to data availability which can be derived from central server; 3) resilient, as the partnerships can adapt to quick switching among multi-suppliers under global balance; and 4) highly cost-effective: the powerful peers are taken full advantage to be larger suppliers. AIRVoD has been demonstrated based on CERNET OF CHINA.