A Survey and Perspective on NVoD Systems for Satellite Networks

In this paper, we review different architectures for near video-on-demand (NVoD) systems on satellite networks. In many scenarios, satellites are the only available option for content distribution. On the other hand, video-on-demand (VoD) has been a topic of intense research in the past. The main problem of VoD systems is that their bandwidth requirements do not scale well with user requests. For this reason, VoD is only feasible under some constraints. In general, NVoD systems are an approximation of VoD ones. In them, downloads do not necessarily start when the request arrives, but some time later. By doing so, it is possible to bound the total required bandwidth at the cost of introducing some delay in content download.