A Fine-Grained Peer Sharing Technique for Delivering Large Media Files Over the Interne

Abstract — In this paper we propose a fine-grained peer sharing technique for delivering large media files in the context of content distribution networks. The replica servers are divided into groups, and those in the same group cooperate with each other to handle client requests. The key difference of the technique from conventional peer to peer systems is that the unit of peer sharing is not a complete media file, but at a finer granularity. By doing so, we increase the flexibility of replica servers for handling client requests. We design a protocol for peers to exchange the information about available resources with each other, and a scheduling algorithm to coordinate the delivery process from multiple replica servers to a client. Our simulations show that the fine-grained peer sharing approach can reduce the initial latency of clients and the rejection rate of the system significantly over a simple peer sharing method. I