A portable communication system for video-on-demand applications using the existing infrastructure

Video on demand (VOD) systems are becoming popular. They have special requirements for receiving VOD data steadily, but common general communication protocols cannot meet their requirements. Several new protocols have been designed to fulfil this service requirement, but it takes a long time for a protocol to be supported from end to end. We propose a VOD communication system that is implemented as an user-level library on top of a common existing protocol. This protocol is easy to port, and the level of connectivity is almost the same as in the underlying existing protocol. We describe the important points related to its implementation, such as the low overhead of implementation and the flow control mechanism. We implemented a prototype system, measured its performance, and concluded that implementing a communication system as a user-level library enables us to implement a VOD portable communication system with a practical level of performance.