Enhanced distributed multimedia services using advanced network technologies

A variety of enhanced multimedia services, including multimedia live streaming and high-quality content sharing, have been enabled by the recent advances in network, storage, and compression technologies. Especially, the improvement of the network technologies has allowed the organization of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network where people can easily share their content with others.;Integrated with the progress in multimedia technology, the advent of new electronic devices has accelerated to achieve those advanced multimedia services efficiently. In particular, a personal video recorder (PVR), one of those electronic devices, has emerged as an effective peer device in a P2P network, since it can store broadcast TV programs on its own embedded hard disk.;In this dissertation, we develop an efficient network architecture such that all users can access high-quality multimedia content easily and the system can support various channels of access to the content. In order to achieve these goals, we adopt two leading technologies in our architecture in addition to a pool of disks as a backup storage; a fiber channel arbitration loop (FC-AL) as a reliable and broadband network connection and PVR as a peer in a P2P network. We have thus demonstrated the feasibility of a PVR-based network architecture by supporting the high-quality content sharing and distribution using the FC-AL. In fact, the promotion of the storage pool and the PVR capability on the FC-AL loop has enabled the system to become quite feasible for serving the emerging P2P streaming services.;Nevertheless, the suggested PVR-based FC-AL network architecture has a critical limitation in terms of the number of attachable PVRs, since the FC-AL is intrinsically based on a single loop organization and the single loop only allows 127 attachable devices.;We therefore develop a novel multiple-loop architecture providing a scalable network organization without using expensive switches. To connect multiple loops in our architecture, we then introduce shared disks that relay TV programs between loops like bridges. When extending into a multiple-loop architecture using the shared disks, it is realized that a topology design for the multiple-loop architecture has a major effect on the imposed total traffic in the whole system. We thus present and compare all possible topologies including linear, ring, edge-added, and complete graph (CG) topology. Finally, the analysis and experimental results reveal that the CG topology among all the possible topologies provides the best scalability.;In addition, we recognize that, as the network size grows using the multiple-loop architecture, popular programs tend to be stored redundantly in many PVRs due to users' viewing skewness, thereby wasting the storage space that could otherwise be used to store additional TV programs. Thus, we also propose to extend program storage hours in terms of the whole system by presenting efficient storage saving algorithms for both PVRs and a backup storage. Through extensive simulations, we finally show that our proposed schemes significantly extend program storage hours by an average of 69.7%.;Lastly, we present a practically constructible architecture solution, named MSG, which maintains both advantages of CG and MST. Thus, the MSG can be expected to be employed in a real constructible network infrastructure by its balance between system performance and cost.