Peer-Assisted Time-Shifted Streaming Systems: Design And Promises

Time-shifted streaming (or catch-up TV) allows viewers to watch their TV programs within an expanded time window. In this paper, we emphasize the challenging characteristics of time-shifted TV systems that prevent known delivery systems to be used. We model time-shifted TV as multiple-interval graph, then we present a Peer-Assisted Catch-Up Streaming system, namely PACUS, where a set of end users' computers assists the server for the content delivery. We show in particular how the PACUS tracker server can be efficiently implemented for catch-up TV. We demonstrate the benefits of PACUS by simulations. We especially highlight that PACUS reduces the traffic at the server side with the advantages of lightweight and self-adaptive unstructured peer-to-peer systems.