SRS: a viewer scheduling strategy using client's buffer in video-on-demand systems

In a VOD system, a scheduling strategy which will satisfy isochronous requirements of showing a video to multiple viewers is needed to reduce the demand for disk I/O and stream capacity. We have proposed the stream relay scheme (SRS) which utilizes the client's buffer space to reduce the server's disk I/O, buffer consumption, and stream capacity. In SRS, the server does not service all the requests which the viewers demand but shares the overhead with other clients who are currently viewing. The performance improvements-in terms of the initial latency and the server throughput-of the SRS have been shown through simulations over a wide range of request arriving intervals.