Chunked-Swarm – Divide and Conquer for Real-Time Bounds in Video Streaming

The biggest problem of current live streaming providers is the enormous amount of data, which has to find its way concurrently to thousands of viewers. Therefore, the provider has to supply enough infrastructure in order to guarantee streaming quality viewer desire. Thus, operational costs increase rapidly with each viewer causing more and more traffic. This is where Strive TrafficBoost, also known as “Chunked-Swarm”, comes in handy.

Instead of letting every viewer download the whole stream on his own, the innovative technology divides data into multiple parts. Each part is split into chunks, which are announced to one viewer at a time. The connected viewers work as a swarm now, meaning every chunk will be shared with peers via web real-time communication (“WebRTC”). This means the swarm acts as one viewer from the serving point of view causing only a fraction of the original traffic. The side effects due to reduced data traffic are better stream stability, less latency, and an increase of available bandwidth for the streaming provider.

Using one of the leading video platform Twitch.TV as an example Strive Media GmbH CTO Christopher Probst discussed this method in his paper “Chunked-Swarm – Divide and Conquer for Real-Time Bounds in Video Streaming“. Read the full article for further information on how the distribution works in detail and how problems are eliminated by the algorithm before they happen.