On the performance of a multicast delivery video-on-demand service with discontinuous VCR actions

In most proposed video-on-demand (VOD) systems, customers are serviced individually by dedicating a transmission channel and a set of video server resources to each customer. We consider a VOD system that uses multicast delivery to service multiple customers with a single set of resources. The use of multicast requires that some interactivity and part of the on-demand nature of the system are sacrificed to achieve scalability and cost-effectiveness. Previous work has considered how VCR actions could be handled in this type of system through the provisioning of set-top box buffering. We consider the provision of discontinuous VCR actions in which the duration of the action is specified in integer multiples of a specified time increment. We evaluate the performance of this system through the use of simulation and compare its performance with an individual delivery (unicast) system and a multicast system with continuous VCR actions.