LiveSky: Enhancing CDN with P2P

Hao Yin, Xuening Liu, Tongyu Zhan, Vyas Sekar, Feng Qiu, Chuang Lin, Hui Zhang, Bo Li

Abstract: We present the design and deployment experiences with LiveSky, a commercial hybrid CDN-P2P live streaming system, which inherits the best of both CDN and P2P. We address several key challenges, including: 1) ease of integration with existing CDN infrastructure, 2) dynamic resource scaling while guaranteeing quality-of-service, 3) providing good user experience, ensuring network friendliness and upload fairness. LiveSky has been used for several large-scale live streaming events in China. Our evaluation results from real-world indicate that such a hybrid CDN-P2P system provides quality and performance comparable to a CDN and effectively scales the system capacity.