Master Thesis - 2008

Recently, content distribution services have become the one of the most popular application in the Internet. The services, however, did not constantly earn revenues which commensurate with the distribution cost of the services. Watchers of the services have to choose one of the two option; low quality services at no charge or high quality services for an expensive fee. Thus, the reduction of distribution can broaden the range of watchers, and make these services even popular.

Researchers proposed methods that combine two popular content distribution technologies; the content delivery network technology and the peer-to-peer technology. They achieved the reduction of distribution cost and improved content distribution speed. These studies, however, bring on conflict of interests among stakeholders, and it is difficult to control the traffic of services because they adopted the peer-to-peer technology.

In this study we show a series of proposals; a business model, a content distribution system, and content distribution technologies. These proposals realize commercial content distribution services run by content distribution service providers and internet service providers. Firstly, we coordinate among the interests of the various stakeholders to encourage them to reduce distribution cost. Secondly, we combine the content delivery network technology and the peer-to-peer technology. Thirdly, we improve the performance of content distribution services. The services are controlled by internet service providers. As a result, services with our proposal realize the services with low cost and high speed, and contribute to various stakeholders.

Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposal by simulation experiments. The evaluation confirms that our proposals reduce load on distribution servers and, and improve the speed of content distribution.