Achieving Scalable and Efficient Video-on-Demand Over Multicast

Abstract

Server bandwidth has been identified as a major bottleneck in large Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems. Using multicast delivery to serve popular content helps increase scalability by making efficient use of server bandwidth. In addition, recent research has focused on proactive schemes in which the server periodically multicasts popular content without explicit requests from clients. Proactive schemes are attractive because they consume bounded server bandwidth irrespective of client arrival rate.

In this work, we describe Fuzzycast, a scalable periodic multicast scheme that uses simple techniques to provide video on demand at reasonable client start-up times while consuming optimum server bandwidth. We start with a theoretically optimum scheme for providing scalable multicast video-on-demand and analyze its performance. We go on to consider a series of issues that are of both theoretical and real-world importance, including support for variable-bitrate (VBR) media and optimum transmission over multiple multicast groups.

Documents

• PDF (12 pages, 390 kBytes)
• IBM Research Report Version
• The Fuzzycast project description, including a list of related publications, some screenshots, topology traces and simulation programs are also available.
• Related documents (CiteSeer/ResearchIndex)
• Part of the Fuzzycast project

BibTeX entry

@TechReport{janakiraman02achieving-techreport,
  Author =      {Ramaprabhu Janakiraman and Marcel Waldvogel and Lihao Xu},
  Title =       {Achieving Scalable and Efficient Video-on-Demand Over Multicast},
  Institution = {IBM},
  Type =        {Research Report},
  Month =       dec,
  Number =      {RZ--3495},
  Year =        2002
}