Proactive Video Push for Optimizing Bandwidth Consumption in Hybrid CDN-P2P VoD Systems.

Decentralizing content delivery to edge devices has become a popular solution for saving the bandwidth consumption of CDN when the CDN bandwidth is expensive. One successful realization is the hybrid CDN-P2P VoD system, where a client is allowed to request video content from a number of seeds (seed clients) in the P2P network. However, the seed scarcity problem may arise for a video resource when there are an insufficient number of seeds to satisfy requests to the video. To alleviate this problem, many commercial VoD systems have employed a video push mechanism that directly sends the recent scarce video resources to randomly-chosen seeds to serve more requests. However, the current video push mechanism fails to consider which videos will become scarce in the future, or differentiate the uploading capability of different seeds. In this paper, we propose Proactive-Push, a video push mechanism that lowers the bandwidth consumption of CDN by predicting future scarce videos and proactively sending them to competent seeds with strong uploading capabilities. Proactive-Push trains neural network models to correctly predict 80% of future scarce video resources, and identify over 90% of competent seeds. We evaluate Proactive-Push using a trace-driven emulation and a real-world pilot deployment over a commercial VoD system. Results show that Proactive-Push can further reduce the proportion of direct download from CDN by 21%, and save the CDN bandwidth cost at peak time by 18%.