Determination of Optimal Buffer Allotment for Video-on-Demand Server

Abstract

The tremendous growth of Internet in popularity especially in the domains of entertainment, education and business had lead to the research on various alternatives to improve the performance of the Video-on-Demand system. The challenge in Video-on-Demand application is to stream uninterrupted, synchronous multimedia data from a video server to a client by utilizing the available resources like bandwidth (channel) and buffer appropriately. The quantity of resource required increases with the increase in the number of clients. As the number of clients increase, the server will reach a limit on the storage capacity. In case of further increase in the load, new servers are to be added which further incurs additional cost. In this context managing the buffer and the channel effectively enables faster retrieval and transfer of multimedia data by providing suitable Quality-of-Service to the client. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to allocate buffer in the local server by using channels in proportion to the popularity of the video. The algorithm reduces start-up latency and reneging probability by utilizing both the channels and buffer effectively thereby the videos are downloaded faster reducing the blocking ratio of the requested video. The results m