Improving content replication and QoS in distributed peer-to-peer VoD appliances

Video-on-demand applications and their corresponding issues have been a long-term research topic. The commercial deployment and exploitation of these scenarios in PAEANs (public authorized enterprise access networks) like in e.g. hotels, schools or airport lounges, however, is still in its early stages. The reason for that are the high associated costs, the huge amount of bandwidth requirements for high-quality video combined with the low penetration of broadband access and the leaking quality of service (QoS) support. We proposed peer-to-peer technology that overcomes these drawbacks. Our approach allows each peer in the network to act as a restricted video-server that offers a low number of selected videos to other peers. This decentralized approach overcomes the traditional drawbacks of client-server based solutions. Crucial to the success of this approach, however, is an intelligent content replication strategy that ensures that highly frequented content is replicated across the network. This allows for innovative workload scaling to avoid local bottlenecks. Furthermore, our architecture allows to transmit this content in quasi real-time. Hence, we present a new QoS-oriented architecture that works in concert with the above mentioned concepts. It uses true point-to-point communication in order to preserve the on-demand character of the applications.