A fast method to optimise network resources for video-on-demand transmission

The transmission of video on demand (VoD) will become one of the most successful services on the Internet. This implies the playback of stored video over a high-speed network with a strict quality of service (QoS). Guaranteeing this QoS requires a very demanding reservation of network resources. That makes optimisation of network resources a key issue. The paper introduces a fast method to optimise network reservations based on the concept of empirical envelope. Previous works face this issue either by using smoothing techniques to reduce peak rates, or in a costly iterative way based on jointly adjusting encoding and channel rates that cannot be efficiently used at transmission time. The proposed method is based on generating a set of points from the stored video with an offline analysis of its empirical envelope, and then using these points to efficiently calculate the optimal reservation for a given channel, at channel establishment time. The paper shows that the number of points generated is very low, making this approach very efficient.