Title: How to stream live on the Internet

Speaker: Ramesh K. Sitaraman (UMass, Amherst)

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
4:00pm - 5:00pm
Computer Science Building, Room 

Abstract: 
Delivering high-definition live media on the Internet is the key driver for a variety of "killer" applications, including Internet TV, multimedia conferencing, and the broadcast of major live events with a global viewership. In this talk, we will review the evolution and architecture of large live stream delivery networks, such as Akamai's live network. We will also talk about the major challenges that underlie scaling live Internet streaming to an  audience of hundreds of millions of simultaneous viewers and enhancing the stream quality to match that of HDTV.  As a specific research challenge, we will talk about the problem of designing an optimal overlay network for live streaming. We derive a provably-good algorithm for solving this problem efficiently using optimization techniques such as randomized rounding and GAP approximation. Further, we evaluate this algorithm algorithm on real-world traces to show that the algorithm produces good quality overlay networks that minimizes cost while obeying quality-of-service requirements.