University of Oregon associate professor Reza Rejaie is developing detours on the Internet highway that may help relieve the congestion caused by streaming live content.
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University of Oregon associate professor Reza Rejaie is developing detours on the Internet highway that may help relieve the congestion caused by streaming live content. Video-sharing websites such as YouTube.com daily captivate the attention of Internet users around the world. They are worth billions of dollars and millions of people use them to share everything from personal blogs to music videos. Platforms where users can broadcast live content also are gaining attention. The traditional approach to streaming live video content uses large amounts of costly bandwidth at the server level. This is the bottleneck that Rejaie says PRIME (peer-to-peer receiver-driven mesh-based streaming) can bypass. Instead of trying to push more information through the same amount of space, he built a system of side roads to alleviate the congestion. PRIME randomly generates a mesh of connections between people who all want to view the same live content. “It utilizes the bandwidth of all participant users,” says graduate student Nazanin Magharei. Since Magharei began collaborating with Rejaie in 2005, mutliple live-broadcasting websites have been developed and they attract more users every day. More users equals more information, and more information equals more congestion — congestion that PRIME may be able to cure.
