GloVE: a distributed environment for low cost scalable VoD systems

In this paper we introduce a scalable Video-on-Demand (VoD) system called GloVE (Global Video Environment) in which active clients cooperate to create a shareable video cache that is used as the primary source of video content for subsequent client requests. In this way, GloVE server's bandwidth does not limit the number of simultaneous clients that can watch a video since once its content is in the cooperative video cache (CVC) it can be directly transmitted from the cache rather than the VoD server Also, GloVE follows the peer-to-peer approach, allowing the use of low-cost PCs as video servers. In addition, GloVE supports video servers without multicast capability and videos in any stored format. We analyze preliminary performance results of GloVE implemented in a PC server using a Fast Ethernet interconnect and small video buffers at the clients. Our results confirm that while the GloVE-based server uses only a single video channel to deliver a highly popular video simultaneously to N clients, conventional VoD servers require as much as N times more channels.