Experience in designing a using TCP as transport protocol VOD system over a dedicated network

We address the problem of designing a TCP and IP (TCP/IP) based video on demand (VOD) system over a dedicated network based on standard internet protocols, i.e., transmission control protocol (TCP) and Internet protocol (IP). TCP and IP are usually referred together as TCP/IP. Despite of the general belief that TCP/IP is not suitable for real-time multimedia applications, after testing in a laboratory environment for about one year, we are confident in announcing that our prototype is both efficient and reliable. This success depends on several important factors. First of all, the system operates on a dedicated network in which there exists no other traffic except a light of background traffic generated by the Ether Switch, the major network component used by our prototype. Second, system overhead due to the VOD server and the network adaptor card is minimized. Third, we maximize the disk bandwidth by implementing a proprietary disk file system. Our experiment shows that it requires only about 330 KBytes at the client buffer to smooth packet delay jitters. In our experimental environment, due to resource limitations, up to 40 clients had been tested successfully. By looking at the network bandwidth and CPU utilization, we estimate that a single VOD server should be able to handle more than 40 interactive clients playing MPEG-1 system streams simultaneously.