| Abstract | Video streaming over the Internet is rapidly increasing in popular-ity, but the availability and quality of the content is limited by the
high bandwidth cost for server-based solutions. Cooperative end-
system multicast (CEM) has emerged as a promising paradigm for
content distribution in the Internet, because the bandwidth over-
head of disseminating content is shared among the participants of
the CEM overlay network. Several CEM systems have been pro-
posed and deployed, but the tradeoffs inherent in the different de-
signs are not well understood.
In this work, we provide a common framework in which different
CEM design choices can be empirically and systematically evalu-
ated. Our results show that all CEM protocols are inherently lim-
ited in certain aspects of their performance. We distill our observa-
tions into a novel model that explains the inherent tradeoffs of CEM
design choices and provides bounds on the practical performance
limits of any future CEM protocol. In particular, the model conjec-
tures that no CEM design can simultaneously achieve all three of
low overhead, low lag, and high streaming quality.
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