Prof Bo LI and CSE PhD Graduate Won Prestigious IEEE INFOCOM Test-of-Time Paper Award

The work of Prof Bo LI, Prof Jiangchuan LIU (CSE PhD graduate), Mr Xinyan ZHANG (CSE alumnus), and Prof Peter YUM (CUHK), "CoolStreaming/DONet: a Data-Driven Overlay Network for Peer-to-Peer Live Media Streaming, IEEE INFOCOM 2005", has been selected as the winner of the inaugural IEEE INFOCOM Test-of-Time Paper Award.

According to Google Scholar citations, the work has been cited for 2031 times. The work developed the first large-scale Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video streaming system in the world. The key technology underpinning the Coolstreaming system was the data-driven overlay, also referred as swarming, which utilized a distributed gossip protocol to explore content availability with a small set of neighbors to form a random overlay for video retrieval. It resulted in a breakthrough from the conventional video broadcast paradigm in that some forms of multicast trees must be used. The random overlay in Coolstreaming achieved superior scaling comparing to the then state-of-the-art technologies. It made a quantum lump from supporting only hundreds of viewers to hundreds of thousands of viewers in the original Coolstreaming system reported in this work appeared in IEEE INFOCOM (2005). The commercial offering of Coolstreaming later was able to scale to support millions of viewers.

The IEEE INFOCOM Test-of-Time Paper Award is newly launched this year to recognize the most frequently cited and widely recognized papers published in the past 10 to 12 years in the INFOCOM proceedings. The award will be presented in the opening ceremony of the 2015 INFOCOM Week in Hong Kong during 26 April - 1 May 2015.