HyperEdge: An Edge CDN Infrastructure for Cost Efficient Video Streaming

As ByteDance’s business expands, the cost of video streaming using content delivery networks (CDN) has become prohibitively high. We have discovered a sea of under-utilized edge devices with the potential to reduce content distribution cost. The unreliable performance of an edge network, however, presents deep challenges to video streaming services. In this work, we introduce HyperEdge, an edge-assisted content delivery system for video streaming. HyperEdge seamlessly integrates the robustness of a conventional CDN with the cost-efficiency of an edge network. It offers dependable streaming quality to users while minimizing traffic expenses. HyperEdge employs a centralized tracker cluster to optimize content distribution to a pool of edge devices, based on real-time monitoring. To ensure satisfactory video playback quality, we develop a novel multi-path protocol for client-edge video transmission. Having been in stable operation for six years, HyperEdge manages over a hundred thousand edge devices, serving about a hundred million users daily, and saving hundreds of millions of dollars in content delivery cost annually.