An experimental VoD server for IPTV

Today, availability of high-speed networks and improved storage and processing power on servers enable Video on Demand (VoD) services much more accessible than before. The VoD services offer very high flexibility to clients and let them watch any video content whenever they like. In this study, we present the design of a scalable VoD server that is capable of supporting in the order of thousands video requests on a local area network. Our proposed design does not require a set-top box at the client side. After its design and implementation of the system, a series of tests are carried out with both 360p and 720p video streams, and CPU, memory and I/O statistics are analyzed. The results show that the major bottleneck in the VoD server is the network bandwidth. When it is provided to be as large as 1 GB/s, we show that our proposed VoD server is capable of serving thousand clients.