A demo for affinity based content delivery architectures

Streaming video data over best effort networks is a challenging task concerning the quality of the received content. The quality decreases with the number of frames that are corrupted, lost or received after the playback time. The main reasons for lost, delayed or corrupted frames are overloaded streaming servers and crowded network paths. <br> In order to deal with overloaded streaming servers and crowded network paths, we present the prototype of an innovative architecture called Proxy-to-Proxy (X2X). The three main components in the architecture are proxies (provided by end users), videos (replicated from original servers) and end-clients (requesting shared content). The behavior of the three components is defined by the so-called affinity model which consists of three levels. The first level covers the content replication from original to surrogate servers (also called proxies), the second level covers the collaboration between the proxies, and the third level covers the delivery from the proxies to the end-clients. <br> Proxies, videos and end-clients have a certain affinity to each other. Only by changing the input parameters to the affinity functions, the overlay network behaves either like a classical 1) Content Delivery Network, 2) a Peer-to-Peer System or 3) a Proxy-to-Proxy overlay network --- which is a combination and generalization of the two former ones.