TreeDN: Tree-Based Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Live Streaming to Mass Audiences

As Internet audience sizes for high-interest live events reach unprecedented levels and bitrates climb to support formats and applications such as 4K, 8K, and Augmented Reality (AR), live streaming can place a unique type of stress upon network resources. TreeDN is a tree-based Content Delivery Network (CDN) architecture designed to address the distinctive scaling challenges of live streaming to mass audiences. TreeDN enables operators to offer Replication-as-a-Service (RaaS) at a fraction of the cost of traditional, unicast-based CDNs -- in some cases, at no additional cost to the infrastructure. In addition to efficiently utilizing network resources to deliver existing multi-destination traffic, this architecture also enables new types of content and use cases that previously were not possible or economically viable using traditional CDN approaches. Finally, TreeDN is a decentralized architecture and a democratizing technology that makes content distribution more accessible to more people by dramatically reducing the costs of replication.