With the exponential rise in video traffic, researchers and developers require more effective tools to validate the efficacy of designed algorithms for Video-on-Demand (VoD) system. However, traditional experimental platforms face two main challenges: a lack of realistic testing and the need for longer and significant effort. To overcome these limitations, we propose Magpie, an efficient experimental platform tailored for VoD systems. Magpie leverages a realistic operational setting, rapid testing, and high reproducibility to closely simulate online user environments without impacting production systems. Compared to conventional simulations, our evaluation demonstrates that Magpie reduces the disparity with online experiments by 85.6%. Deployed within our company-a leading video content provider in China-Magpie has efficiently validated over tens of algorithms, with 80% demonstrating enhanced performance in subsequent online tests.

Multi-site Parallel Downloading is a technique that uses multiple low-cost edge nodes in the Internet to transfer short video content. Traditional multi-path congestion control fails to achieve fast convergence and high bandwidth utilization in MPD scenarios due to the over-coupling of subflows. In this paper, we propose a semi-coupled congestion control design for the MPD scenario by reallocating traffic between independent subflows. In simulation experiments, our design outperforms baseline models of traditional MPTCP.

In mobile social delay tolerant networks, many human-carried mobile devices are moving around in a restricted physical space and occasional contact opportunities among these devices are used to deliver data. Routing design in mobile social delay tolerant networks has been a challenging task due to lack of instantaneous end-to-end paths, large transmission delays, and time-varying network topology. In this paper, aiming to precisely measure the social relationships between mobile nodes, we introduce two kinds of time-varying closeness, direct and indirect closeness, where the temporal constraint is considered. Then we propose both single-copy and multi-copy closeness-based routing schemes, which consider direct and indirect social relationships under temporal constraint. Extensive simulations on real-life data traces show the proposed schemes can achieve better performances than existing DTN routing methods.