A scalable video-on-demand service for the provision of VCR-like functions

One approach to supporting continuous media traffic is via resource reservation at connection establishment time. The shortcomings of this approach are the lack of flexibility in re-negotiating bandwidth parameters after connection establishment and the inability to react to changing server load conditions. In this paper, we propose a "selected access scheme" for re-negotiating continuous media delivery from a video-on-demand server. We consider the overall system perspective on resource availability rather than a per-connection resource management scheme. The selected access scheme is combined with data placement strategies for the server to dynamically access desired video frames from a shared storage device. This approach is especially suitable for video data compressed and stored using an inter-frame encoding scheme such as specified by the MPEG standard. Simulation results show that the proposed model can utilize server bandwidth, improve the reliability of playback, reduce the buffering needed and support VCR-like functions without blocking user access to the storage device.