Providing on-demand video services using request batching

In an on-demand video system, requests for a video file arriving within a period of time can be batched together and served with a single multicast stream; thereby reducing the bandwidth requirement compared with the unbatched case. We study various batching schemes to meet delay and profitability requirements-in the window-size based and moving-average schemes, maximum and average user delay respectively are guaranteed; in the batch-size based scheme, minimal profitability is maintained; in the adaptive scheme, both the delay and profitability can be balanced. We analyse and compare these schemes in terms of the delay experienced by the users, and their profitability (the number of users in a batch, the number of concurrent streams, etc.).