Shadowvod: Performance Evaluation As A Capability In Production P2p-Cdn Hybrid Vod Networks

Video-on-Demand (VoD) services have achieved great success recently. Most such streaming systems are P2P-CDN hybrid systems. To ensure reliable performance, the most efficient way is to subject those VoD streaming networks to large-scale, realistic performance evaluations. Our previous ShadowStream system is a production Internet live streaming network with performance evaluation as a built-in capability. In this paper, we extend the same idea into the VoD services. There exists significant difference between live and VoD, hence ShadowStream cannot be directly used in VoD context. Firstly, clients in P2P-VoD service are not synchronized in viewing progress; secondly, in VoD there exists interactive operations (e.g., pause and drag); thirdly, the different playpoints of users also bring difficulty to replacing departed real clients. In this paper, we solve all above mentioned challenges. We implement ShadowVoD and demonstrate its benefits through extensive evaluations.