Assured video streaming across overlay networks on the internet

The overlay network model [4] furnishes multimedia content providers with more control and flexibility in an end-to-end fashion. We have developed a novel proxy-assisted staggered two-flow multimedia distribution technique for delivering large multimedia objects (e.g., videos) in an overlay Content Distribution Network (CDN) across the best-effort Internet. The objective of the proposed technique is to provide a controlled quality assurance by exploiting the available application information, the storage space at proxy servers and the coarse-grain aggregate bandwidth guarantee of a best-effort overlay network on the Internet. To illustrate the proposed technique, we present a framework for streaming stored MPEG videos. We further address the issue of controlled bandwidth sharing and the issue of application-aware admission control and traffic management in the implementation of the framework.