On Scalable Interactive Video-On-Demand Services

The deployment of a high-quality VoD service at low-bandwidth cost is still far from widespread. Moreover, DVD-like operations have recently become essential for applications using this type of service. Focusing on interactive access, this paper proposes the Efficient Interactive Patching (EIP) and Interactive Merge (IM) schemes. The former is an optimization of the original Patching streaming protocol, and the latter is an optimization of the original Closest Target streaming protocol. Additionally, two new policies for exploiting the client's buffering capability are proposed: Unique Buffer (UB) and Precise Buffer (PB). Throughout trace-driven simulations, using workloads generated from real multimedia servers, we validate our proposals and carry out detailed competitive analyses with other proposals in the literature. Our results show that combining the optimizations with the buffer policies makes it possible to achieve quite significant overall reductions at average bandwidth, peak bandwidth and system complexity