A Scalable Solution for Interactive Near Video-on-Demand Systems

The required real-time and high-rate transfer of multimedia data limits the numbers of requests that can be concurrently serviced by video-on-demand (VOD) systems. Resource-sharing techniques can be used to address this scalability challenge, but they greatly complicate the efficient support for interactive operations. We develop an overall solution for interactive near VOD systems that employ resource sharing. The proposed solution supports user interactions with short response times and low rejection probabilities. The solution includes a novel stream provisioning policy, which dynamically determines the best number of I-Streams (unicast streams for supporting interactive requests) and the maximum I-Stream length that can be allocated by the server. Furthermore, we use a sophisticated client-side cache management policy to maximize the percentage of interactive requests serviced from the client's own cache. We study the system using realistic workload through extensive simulation.