Content Distribution over Wireless Mesh Networks

With the increasing bandwidth of networks, we can demand more for multimedia services. But due to the huge consumption of resources, transmission quality will be degraded when user population grows. Akamai is a content distribution service provider, it not only solves problems mentioned before, but also improves the efficiency of multimedia transmission.
Wireless mesh network(WMN) is an architecture that allows accessing Internet through multihop transmission. It becomes popular because of its low cost and wide coverage. Thus, for a city, institute, or company, it is an excellent "last-mile" solution. We can expect that many multimedia services will be provided on this network architecture. But compared with wired networks, there are many constraints on wireless communication, such as low bandwidth and interference. So we should not directly apply CDN architecture on the Internet. It is needed to take the characteristics of wireless mesh network into consideration and come up with a new architecture to handle content distribution in this environment.
In this paper, we focus on live event broadcasting services and design a suitable architecture for transmitting multimedia packets in wireless mesh networks. We are motivated by Akamai and the concept of Internet backbone. We propose a “two-stage” content distribution scheme that combines overlay backbone and virtual circuit to improve throughput, delay jitter, and also support dynamic user management.