Thunder crystal: a novel crowdsourcing-based content distribution platform

Copyright 2015 ACM.Content distribution, especially the distribution of video content, unavoidably consumes bandwidth resource heavily. Internet content providers (ICP) spend lots of money to buy content distribution network (CDN) service. By deploying thousands of edge servers close to end users, CDN companies are able to distribute content efficiently. In lieu of traditional CDN systems, we implement a crowdsourcing-based content distribution system, Thunder Crystal, which utilizes agents' upload bandwidth to amplify the content distribution capacity. Agents are well motivated to contribute storage and upload bandwidth to the system by rebated cash. As far as we know, this is a novel system that has not been studied before. In this work, we will present its design principles first. Then, we study agent behavior and methods to evaluate system efficiency and user efficiency. We evaluate the system by simulations, and observe that agents are well motivated to keep online most of the time and amplify the content distribution capacity by 10∼20 times. Refereed/Peer-reviewed