Analysis of a large-scale VOD architecture for broadband operators: a P2P-based solution

VOD services distribution is gaining unprecedented interest from the consumer communication industry due to its growing success in both the Internet and residential broadband market. In this article we present a scalable VOD distribution architecture for broadband operators. The solution is based on a P2P streaming concept in which a VOD streaming session requested by a given STB is actually provisioned via a multisource streaming session. This solution has the advantage of scaling naturally with the number of STBs in the network. In this article we focus on efficiently translating the popularity distribution into content availability in the network. Different aspects related to this issue are analyzed and challenges highlighted.