Achieving simultaneous distribution control and privacy protection for Internet media delivery

Abstract

Massive Internet media distribution demands prolonged continuous consumption of networking and disk bandwidths in large capacity. Many proxy-based Internet media distribution algorithms and systems have been proposed, implemented, and evaluated to address the scalability and performance issue. However, few of them have been used in practice, since two important issues are not satisfactorily addressed. First, existing proxy-based media distribution architectures lack an efficient media distribution control mechanism. Without copyright protection, content providers are hesitant to use proxy-based fast distribution techniques. Second, little has been done to protect client privacy during content accesses on the Internet. Straightforward solutions to address these two issues independently lead to conflicts. For example, to enforce distribution control, only legitimate users should be granted access rights. However, this normally discloses more information (such as which object the client is accessing) other than the client identity, which conflicts with the client's desire for privacy protection. In this article, we propose a unified proxy-based media distribution protocol to effectively address these two problems simultaneously. We further design a set of new algorithms in a cooperative proxy environment where our proposed scheme works efficiently and practically. Simulation-based experiments are conducted to extensively evaluate the proposed system. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategy.