Oral Comprehensive Exam Details

Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery

Abstract

In this survey, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of content delivery mechanisms over the Internet that incorporates two key application requirements, namely the type of content (i.e. elastic and streaming content), and communication model (i.e one/many to one/many). Our taxonomy distinguishes between two approaches to implement a content delivery mechanism, which are placing the required machinery in the core or at the edge of the network.

We primarily focus on a particular approach of content delivery mechanism that is implemented at end systems, called peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery. We broadly divide P2P content delivery mechanisms into three groups based on their communication model into one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. For each one of these groups, we explore the key challenges, main design issues and tradeoffs, including the implications of content type on the design. We also discuss the similarities and differences between different groups of P2P content delivery mechanism.