Video-on-Demand: Scalability and QoS Control

Abstract

Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems face scalability problems and Quality of Service (QoS) issues due to the need to satisfy numerous requests for several different videos given the limited bandwidth of the communication links. In order to provide scalable solutions and guarantee given QoS requirements, existing VoD proposals can be roughly divided into two categories: (a) scheduled multicast, and (b) periodic broadcast. In this chapter we propose (a) a novel scheduled multicast scheme based on a time-dependent bandwidth allocation approach, (b) a Trace-Adaptive Fragmentation (TAF) scheme for periodic broadcast of Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoded video, and (c) a Loss-Less and Bandwidth-Efficient (LLBE) protocol for periodic broadcast of VBR video. We have designed, simulated and evaluated the proposed schemes, and the simulation results demonstrate the benefits, flexibility and feasibility of the proposals.