M.Sc. Thesis by Jacob de Fine Skibsted and Stephan Lynge
The overall goal in this work was to distribute the usage of bandwidth in a client-server network providing video-on-demand streaming. To achieve this a protocol for on-demand streaming was designed and implemented by employing methods resembling those used in peer-to-peer networks.
A protocol specification which enables forwarding of data between clients to lower the bandwidth consumption of the server was developed. The data stream is divided into pieces in order to enable multiple clients to send part of the data stream to a single receiver and at the same time offer the full functionalities of on-demand streaming such as pause and skip. Finally, the primary functionalities of the protocol specification were implemented and used in a set of test applications.
We succeeded in designing a protocol which can distribute the overall bandwidth in a logical network offering video on-demand streaming. Thus the bandwidth usage of the central server will be lowered. Based on the design a fully operational implementation was developed. Analysis of the actual savings is still open as this would demand a large-scale real-life usage of the protocol together with empirical measurements.
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