Live Network Streaming with Utilities and Cost

The growth in Internet traffic associated with video streaming and sharing of videos is so rapid that it may soon dwarf all other forms of Internet content. One reason for this is that only some forms of content can be cached (such as movies). Data generated in real time such as by live video broadcasts (e.g. sports games, IPTV or new episodes of popular TV shows), chat systems, immersive virtual reality applications and games typically can’t be cached at all, and in today’s systems, each client may pull such information on its own point-to-point (TCP) stream directly from the data center, even if large numbers of clients share interest in at least some aspects of the data. We propose a new system called GRADIENT aimed at reducing the load on providers of such and enabling scalable, bandwidthsensitive streaming service for heterogeneous consumers. The core of the system is an overlay networking architecture intended to run directly on a content hosting platform, and which optimizes aggregate bandwidth use by transforming in-flight data to match the ideal stream quality – expressed as an economic utility – of the consuming client.