On Multiple Description Streaming with Content Delivery Networks

Abstract— CDNs have been widely used to provide low latency, scalability, fault tolerance, and load balancing for the delivery of web content and more recently streaming media. We propose a system that improves the performance of streaming media CDNs by exploiting the path diversity provided by existing CDN infrastructure. Path diversity is provided by the different network paths that exist between a client and its nearby edge servers; and multiple description (MD) coding is coupled with this path diversity to provide resilience to losses. In our system, MD coding is used to code a media stream into multiple complementary descriptions, which are distributed across the edge servers in the CDN. When a client requests a media stream, it is directed to multiple nearby servers which host complementary descriptions. These servers simultaneously stream these complementary descriptions to the client over different network paths. This paper provides distortion models for MDC video and convent...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: John G. Apostolopoulos, Tina Wong, Susie J. Wee, Daniel Tan
• Keywords: Communications, Complementary Descriptions, INFOCOM 2002, Path Diversity, Streaming Media