An Efficient Implementation of Interactive Video-on-Demand

The key performance bottleneck for a video-on-demand (VOD) server is bandwidth, which controls the number of clients the server can simultaneously support. Previ-ous work has shown that a strategy called stream tapping can make efficient use of bandwidth when clients are not allowed to interact (through VCR-like controls) with the video they are viewing. Here we present an interactive version of stream tapping and analyze its performance through the use of discrete event simulation. In partic-ular, we show that stream tapping can use as little as 10% of the bandwidth required by dedicating a unique stream of data to each client request.