Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol
Senior Project: 2006-2007
Ashvin Mysore, Galen Pahlke, James Sanders and Thomas Stapleton
ClickCaster, Inc. is a small, Boulder-based startup focused on the syndicated
distribution of on-demand media. Currently, their software platform provides
content creation and delivery tools for audio and video podcasts. ClickCaster's
current software serves video and audio streams using a traditional network
model -- many clients, all streaming data off a single server. They wanted to
reduce bandwidth costs by moving to a peer-to-peer distribution system. This
would allow their software to scale much more readily to the needs of their
clients, letting ClickCaster sell their platform to companies with far more
limited bandwidth than they are presently able to do.
The solution, DistribuStream, looks like a peer-to-peer network architecture
with a centralized server. Peer nodes function as both a server and a client,
which will reduce bandwidth on the centralized server and thus decrease costs
for ClickCaster and their clients. Further, the network will improve, in terms
of transfer speeds and file availability, as the number of clients increases.
The centralized server is used to guarantee the availability of files and to
control content distribution on the network, which is vital for the copyrighted
material that is served. And since the server utilizes strict central control
of the transfer process, files can be streamed and a steady rate of traffic
delivered to clients can be ensured. From the perspective of the end user, the
content is selected and viewed as if it came directly from the server. This
transparency allows for users to interact with the system in their normal
fashion. The software was implemented using Ruby on Rails.
 Architecture
Test Environment
|
