A secure and scalable video conference system based on peer-assisted content delivery networks

摘要

With the ever-increasing demand for multimedia conferencing over the Internet, video conferencing systems that enable efficient and secure data delivery have been a hot yel challenging research topic in both academy and industry. To deploy large-scale commercial video conferencing services, we need to address critical issues, such as Quality-of-Service (QoS), security and scalability. In this paper, we propose a secure and scalable video conferencing system over the Internet, namely Video Conference Network Platform (VCNP). VCNP organizes users into a Chord-based Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay, and utilizes Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP) for the management of conference members, which includes the setup of media sessions and the storage of user contact information and conferencing group information over distributed peers. A VPN session over P2PSIP is implemented to act as a secure infrastructure for VCNP. For video data delivery, we design a framework of Peer-assisted CDN (Content Delivery Network), which uses both edge servers and fiber network in CDN, and the principle of structured P2P management to enhance the QoS, scalability and flexibility of the system. Based on the proposed architecture and protocols, VCNP has already been implemented and deployed over the Internet. Fxperimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of VCNP in delivering the unprecedented security, scalability, and certain QoS simultaneously in a unified architecture.