Best-Effort Patching for Multicast True VoD Service

A multicast Video-on-Demand (VoD) system allows clients to share a server stream by batching their requests, and hence, improves channel utilization. However, it is very difficult to equip such a VoD system with full support for interactive VCR functions which are important to a growing number of Internet applications. In order to eliminate service (admission) latency, patching was proposed to enable an existing multicast session to dynamically add new clients, and requests can be served without delay if patching channels are available. A true VoD (TVoD) service should support not only zero-delay client admission but also continuous VCR-like interactivity. However, the conventional patching is only suitable for admission control. We propose a new patching scheme, called Best-Effort Patching (BEP), that offers a TVoD service in terms of both request admission and VCR interactivity. Moreover, by using a novel dynamic merging algorithm, BEP significantly improves the efficiency of TVoD interactivity, especially for popular videos. We also model and evaluate the efficiency of the dynamic merging algorithm. It is shown that BEP outperforms the conventional TVoD interaction protocols.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47328/1/11042_2005_Article_6851.pd

Cooperative Video Caching for Interactive and Scalable VoD Systems

In this work, we introduce a novel technique called Cooperative Video Caching (CVC) that enables scalable and interactive Video-on-Demand (SI-VoD) servers to be developed. The key insight of CVC is to exploit the client buffers as a large global distributed memory that can be randomly accessed over the communication network. CVC uses patching and chaining but in such a way that minimizes communication traffic, eliminates the chaining interruption problem, and most important, enables VCR-like interaction. Through detailed CVC simulations our results show that CVC-based servers are potentially scalable. In addition, we show that interactive CVC servers signi cantly outperform conventional interactive VoD servers. These preliminary results suggest that CVC is a promising technique to develop SI-VoD server

Discrete broadcasting protocols for video-on-demand

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comThe Video-on-demand (VOD) service allows users to view any video program from a server at the time of their choice. Broadcasting protocols can be used to improve the efficiency of a VOD system. The Harmonic Broadcasting Protocol has been proved to be bandwidth-optimal, but it is not efficient for the local storage. In this paper, we present the Discrete Broadcasting scheme, which can intelligently adjust its solution according to available bandwidth and local storage in order to achieve an ideal waiting time.Chao Peng, Hong Shen, Naixue Xiong and Laurence T. Yan