CDN+P2P, the Next Generation Internet Video Live Broadcast Engine?

Ignore the price wars that have repeatedly exploded in the traditional CDN field. Recently, in the technical field of P2P+ CDN, the market seems to have set off an invisible battle.

Create fast broadcast P2P technology is born with a spirit of sharing
In terms of technical level, concept level and even market operation, "P2P" technology has existed for a long time in the development of China's Internet in recent years. In the era of fast broadcasting, the technology has developed to its heyday-serving 400 million users of fast broadcasting. It has created an industry record of 80 million daily active users and over 60 million concurrent online users. Of course, it does not rule out the possibility that P2P will become a technological explosion in the prevailing live broadcast and on-demand. For P2P, in this kind of network technology rich in sharing spirit, each node is the provider and receiver of the service, and each node shares some of its own hardware resources, including computing, storage, and transmission capabilities. Included in it.

In reality, a more popular explanation is: relying on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network, instead of concentrating all the dependencies on a few servers. If you want to download a resource, you need to fetch it from the central server that provides the resource through your own computer. However, in P2P mode, you can fetch it from any netizen's computer that has the resource, and the downloaded resource may also become the object of other netizens. It is no exaggeration to say that even a small water pipe can watch high-definition video on broadband.

Around 2001, P2P traffic grew at an alarming rate. By 2004, it surpassed HTTP protocol applications and became the most common application on the Internet and a major consumer of bandwidth. In 2007, the growth of P2P traffic began to slow down. With the outbreak of live broadcasting in 2016, capital entered, and the live broadcasting industry poured into nearly 300 companies. In 2017, short video corners overtaking, successively obtained financing, the industry heat situation has also led to fierce competition, and the regulatory mechanism has cooled the market, but the increase in the proportion of video transmission in Internet traffic has become an irreversible trend.

The diversification of video scenes has led to rapid innovation in the video industry, which puts forward higher requirements for clarity and smooth experience, and bandwidth costs have become a hurdle that cannot be ignored. P2P has become a good way of sharing resources because of its better utilization of idle bandwidth, saving a lot of costs for enterprises.


Complementary advantages CDN+P2P has gradually become the industry trend
When live broadcasting and on-demand broadcasting become a heavy application of the Internet that penetrates into thousands of households, they naturally represent the vast majority of traffic sources running on the Internet in the future. We can see the difference between the peak value of live broadcast service and on-demand service. Why is live broadcast integrated with P2P? Because the live CDN has been through the efforts of various manufacturers on the market, it has achieved relatively good functions, performance, stability and responsiveness. The one-second delay, second opening, high quality, and low lag have also been continuously solved. , Why go to combine?

It can be seen that the peak value of the on-demand service is very balanced, while the live broadcast often has a very high concurrency, which is basically concentrated in a certain instantaneous time period. Pure use will bring high bandwidth costs.

For CDN, the core idea is to distribute content resources from the center of the network to the edge of the network nearest to users, and use load balancing technology to direct user access requests to edge servers, reducing the response time of user access and reducing the backbone network pressure. In essence, CDN is an enhancement of the server-side capabilities in the c/s mode. System expansion requires continuous deployment of server nodes and can meet the needs of the peak traffic. However, it is difficult to improve the efficiency of the CDN system due to the suddenness and unevenness of user access.

Traditional P2P is the P2SP architecture used by the early BitTorrent. Its biggest feature is high sharing rate and low availability.
After careful analysis, we can find that P2P technology has good scalability but cannot be effectively managed. CDN technology is easy to manage and reliable but has poor scalability. It can be said that CDN has advantages that P2P does not have, and that P2P has advantages that CDN does not have. The two technologies can be integrated. Building a network with better performance can also reduce the overall cost of use.


At present, P2P technology principles and technical architecture are understood by more people, and the cost-saving features are being favored by the B-end market. Whether it is a CDN manufacturer, a new media OTT company, or a webcast company, the combination of CDN and P2P has become a consensus, and the combination of the two is releasing huge technological dividends.

It is undeniable that the establishment of the business model is based on years of accumulation of technological innovation and market exploration rather than the so-called "upgrade" of concepts. Products can be copied quickly, and services can be imitated, but innovation awareness and innovation capabilities are difficult to copy.