Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are in a constant race to meet the bandwidth demands of their subscribers. Access link upgrades, however, are expensive and take years to deploy. Many ISPs are looking for alternative solutions to reduce the need for continuous and expensive infrastructure expansion. This paper shows that there are many forms of local connectivity and storage in residential environments, and that these resources can be used to relieve some of the access network load. Making effective use of this local connectivity, however, introduces several challenges that require careful application and protocol design. We present a new system for a neighborhood-assisted video-on-demand service that reduces access link traffic by carefully placing VoD data across the neighborhood and deciding what network technology should be used to transfer it between homes. We demonstrate analytically and experimentally that this approach can reduce the access network traffic that ISPs must provision for by up to 45% while still providing high-quality service.

35 pages

*Intel Labs Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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