Peer-to-Peer Batching Policy for Video-on-Demand System

Multicast and peer-to-peer (P2P) are two common transmission strategies to provide scalable and cost efficient solutions for video-on-demand (VoD) services. It is noted that a native P2P mechanism requires small server resources and provides an insensitive delay to users. However, the bandwidth requirement inside the network is rapidly increased when more customers joins the video session. On the other hand, if the system simply uses a multicast scheme to deliver the video, the customers have to wait for a noticeable delay before watching the videos whereas the overall bandwidth requirement will not be significantly increased. In this paper, a new transmission policy denoted peer-to-peer batching (PPB) policy is proposed to exploit the multicast capability of the network and P2P paradigm to efficiently deliver video data to the clients. Our analysis shows that the proposed PPB scheme achieves better system performance when compared with Patching (a native multicast system) and DirectStream (a native P2P system).