Integrated admission control in hierarchical video-on-demand systems

We develop a unified model of a hierarchical video-on-demand (VoD) system by integrating the storage and the network subsystems. Rather than restricting the analysis to an isolated subsystem the performance of the VoD system is analyzed as an end-to-end system. On a system-wide basis, request handling and admission control policies are designed to minimize global performance metrics. Through our simulation, we compare different request handling policies and show that a hierarchical VoD architecture with request handling that allows retrials at more than one resource will minimize overall blocking.