Deploying Video-on-Demand Services on Cable Networks (vod-icdcs.pdf)

Matthew S. Allen, Ben Zhao, and Rich Wolski.

Intl. Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Toronto, Canada, June 25-29, 2007.

Abstract

Efficient video-on-demand (VoD) is a highly desired service for media and telecom providers. VoD allows subscribers to view any item in a large media catalog nearly-instantaneously. However, systems that provide this service currently require large amounts of centralized resources and significant bandwidth to accommodate their subscribers. Hardware requirements become more substantial as the service providers increase the catalog size or number of subscribers. In this paper, we describe how cable companies can leverage deployed hardware in a peer-to-peer architecture to provide an efficient alternative. We propose a distributed VoD system, and use real measurements from a deployed VoD system to evaluate different design decisions. Our results show that with minor changes, currently deployed cable infrastructures can support a video-on-demand system that scales to a large number of users and catalog size with low centralized resources.

@inproceedings{msa07vod,
  author = "M. Allen and B. Zhao and R. Wolski",
  title = "Deploying Video-on-Demand Services on Cable Networks",
  booktitle = "Intl. Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)",
  year = "2007",
  month = "June",
  address = "Toronto, Canada"
}