I was shocked that P2P can be used for interactive live broadcasting

The "No-delay P2P" launched by Yunfan Accelerator in August 2016 has been verified by a large number of customers, and its performance is comparable to CDN, and has been added to the shared CDN deluxe package. But what exactly is the No-delay P2P that has been mentioned countless times?

P2P development | Distinctive personality but also ups and downs

As we all know, P2P has distinct advantages and disadvantages, which has led to its ups and downs. At the beginning of its development, P2P traffic grew at an astonishing rate around 2001. By 2004, it surpassed HTTP protocol applications and became the most common application and major consumer of bandwidth on the Internet. In 2007, the growth of P2P traffic began to slow down. However, with the development of the video industry in recent years, the proportion of video transmission in Internet traffic has increased year by year. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI)***, the proportion of video in global Internet traffic will increase from 63% in 2015 to 79% in 2020. In 2020, the proportion of HD and UHD Internet video playback in total video traffic will increase from 53% in 2015 to 82%.

Image courtesy of VNI

With the explosion of live broadcasting in 2016, capital entered the market, and live broadcasting apps sprang up like mushrooms after rain. So far, there are nearly 300 live broadcasting companies. The hot situation in the industry has also led to fierce competition among industries. Although various live broadcasting supervision mechanisms have been introduced in policies, which have slightly reduced the popularity of live broadcasting, the live broadcasting + trend has been formed. In the future, live broadcasting will still account for an important proportion of video traffic. P2P applications are also popular again under the general trend of videoization, but due to the high latency, the live broadcasting industry is still very secretive about P2P technology. Even in the face of the pressure of large traffic and bandwidth, CDN is still chosen for network acceleration.

No-delay P2P|Born for live streaming

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At present, there are two approaches in the entire P2P system. One is the P2P with delay, which is mature and widely used in the market. It has a high sharing rate and is suitable for on-demand and large-scale live broadcasts of events, concerts, etc. that do not require high delay. For the current hot interactive live broadcast, Yunfan Accelerator is committed to solving several major drawbacks of P2P in the spirit of technology first, and has developed a P2P without delay, realizing the world's first high-definition video live broadcast system based on P2P + streaming media technology.

Compared with other companies, Yunfan Accelerator's technical team has streaming media technology genes, 7 years of P2P technology accumulation, and has experienced the test of hundreds of millions of users of Qvod. In addition, as early as the Qvod era, P2P technology was already the best in China, and the P4P function prevented traditional P2P from swallowing up bandwidth and affecting the user experience of using other applications. With the rise of mobile Internet, Yunfan Accelerator has also optimized the mobile terminal in four aspects: power consumption, resources, network identification and upload, as shown below:

In the actual transmission process, traditional P2P only uses the nearest terminal node. Because it is disordered, it exposes the shortcomings of P2P nodes: poor speed and possible disconnection at any time.

Yunfan Acceleration Delay-free P2P adopts an active discovery mechanism from user to target node. Through big data calculation, it analyzes each user's historical habits, speed and network distribution, etc. to predict the upload capacity and online time of each node, accurately determine the node quality of each user, and realize the supply of high-quality nodes to non-high-quality nodes. Although it sacrifices a part of the sharing rate (40% on average), it can control the live broadcast delay to 1 second, comparable to high-quality CDN transmission network.

The core technology of Yunfan Acceleration lies in the self-developed CDN system, which belongs to the data transmission layer together with P2P. CDN and P2P have natural complementary characteristics in architecture, which provides an opportunity for the combination of CDN and P2P. In terms of management and security issues, CDN makes up for the weakness of P2P. During data transmission, the source stream is processed by Yunfan Acceleration Streaming Media Cloud Platform for slicing, transpackaging, etc., and then distributed to the CDN system. The terminal can obtain data from CDN, and can also perform P2P transmission. The terminals cover TV, PC, and even Android, iOS and other mobile terminals. When the P2P speed is high enough, P2P will be used for a long time and will not return to the CDN mode. If there is not enough data on this P2P channel, it will switch to CDN to ensure the reliability of data transmission.

In the process of combining P2P with CDN, it is not only CDN that can provide quality assurance for P2P. In terms of CDN node deployment and link selection, Yunfan Accelerator combines P2P's multi-channel transmission technology to achieve a spider-web network structure. All nodes are unified, both at the edge and at the upper layer. The entire system is very flexible, and node links can be adjusted dynamically. This not only reduces transmission costs and improves terminal transmission speeds, but also changes the data dependence on the central node during the previous CDN tree structure transmission process, avoiding global failures caused by core node problems.

Since its launch more than half a year ago, Zero Delay P2P has been verified and recognized by a large number of *** customers. Currently, Zero Delay P2P has also been added to the Yunfan Acceleration Shared CDN Deluxe Package.

Conclusion: Since its inception, Yunfan Accelerator has been adhering to the concept of delivering immeasurable value to users and has been deeply involved in the field of streaming media. With its vitality and strength of continuous innovation, it set a small goal for itself in 2017: to become the standard CDN in the field of streaming media.