An Integrated Approach to Scalable Content Delivery Over the Internet

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CCR-0204304.

PIs: Zongming Fei, James Griffioen, Mukesh Singhal

Project Description

The focus of this project is to develop techniques that can provide better access to web information and services to a rapidly growing user population. First, we developed techniques for delivering dynamic documents over the Internet. We proposed an effective method to maintain the consistency of dynamic documents at the replica servers with those at the origin server. Second, we developed a novel layered multicast protocol that builds on the simple, lightweight network building blocks of Ephemeral State Processing. We investigated and proposed failure detection and recovery techniques to improve the resilience of overlay multicast for content distribution. Third, we developed a fine-grained peer sharing technique for replica servers to cooperate with each other to serve the clients. Fourth, we have designed and analyzed a new model for replica placement in content distribution networks. Last, but not the least, we performed extensive simulations and PlanetLab experiments to evaluate the proposed schemes and implemented an overlay multicast-based prototype for content delivery.

A Java-based implementation of overlay multicast for multimedia streaming is available for downloading.

Graduate Students

Ph.D. Students (RA): Mengkun Yang, Siddhartha Gupte, Boxuan Gu, Zhen Zhang, Hu Wang, and Billy Mullins

M.S. Students (RA): Sandeep Parwal, Kiran P.R. Challagolla and Anuradha Kishan.

M.S. Students: Amit Kumar, Kamal Shah, Srikrishna Putta, Anand Kumar Kadiyala, Vinay Srivastava, Christopher Dunkle, Venkata Rachabatthula, Juan Xie, Sathish Ramani, SandeepKumar Seethaapathy, and Shashank Jeedigunta.

Publications

Zongming Fei, Mengkun Yang, ``A proactive tree recovery mechanism for resilient overlay multicast," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol.15, no.1, pp.173-186, February 2007.
Zongming Fei, Mengkun Yang, ``A segmentation-based fine-grained peer sharing technique for delivering large media files in content distribution networks," IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol.8, no.4, pp.821-829, August 2006.
Zongming Fei, Mostafa H. Ammar, Ibrahim Kamel, Sarit Mukherjee, ``An active buffer management technique for providing interactive functions in broadcast video-on-demand systems," IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol.7, no.5, pp.942-950, October 2005.
Mengkun Yang, Zongming Fei, ``Cooperative failure detection in overlay multicast," Proceedings of IFIP Networking 2005, LNCS 3462, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, May 2005.
Zongming Fei, Mengkun Yang, ``Intra-session fairness in multicast communications," Telecommunication Systems, vol.29, no.4, pp.235-255, August 2005.
Zongming Fei, Mengkun Yang, ``Restoring delivery tree from node failures in overlay multicast," IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol.E88-B, no.5, pp.2046-2053, May 2005.
Mengkun Yang, Zongming Fei, ``Techniques of reconstructing overlay multicast trees for multimedia streaming," Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2005), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 2005.
Mengkun Yang, Zongming Fei, ``A Proactive Approach to Reconstructing Overlay Multicast Trees", Proceedings of INFOCOM 2004, Hong Kong, March 2004.
Mengkun Yang, Zongming Fei, ``A Segmentation-Based Approach to Delivering Multimedia Files in Content Distribution Networks", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2004), Paris, France, June 2004.
Zongming Fei, ``A New Consistency Algorithm for Dynamic Documents in Content Distribution Networks", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, vol.63, no.10, pp.916-926, October 2003.
Zongming Fei, Mengkun Yang, Mostafa Ammar, Ellen Zegura, ``A Framework for Allocating Clients to Rate-Constrained Multicast Servers", Computer Communications, vol.26, no.12, pp.1255-1262, July 2003.
Mengkun Yang, Zongming Fei, ``A Fine-Grained Peer Sharing Technique for Delivering Large Media Files Over the Internet", Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (WCW 2003), Hawthorne, NY, September 2003.
Mengkun Yang, Zongming Fei, ``A Model for Replica Placement in Content Distribution Networks for Multimedia Applications", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2003), Anchorage, Alaska, May 2003.
Zongming Fei, Mengkun Yang, ``On max-min intra-session fairness in replicated multicast services", Proceedings of Fourth International Workshop on Networked Group Communications (NGC'02), Boston, MA, October 2002, pp.115-122.