Simulation of a Video-on-Demand System

This paper presents a simulation study of a video-on-demand system. The focus of the study is the effectiveness of different caching strategies on a video-on-demand system with two levels of cache, RAM and disks, in front of a tape library. Using an event-driven simulator, I show that the service capacity of the system benefited only marginally from caching if no other information was available. I find that ondemand caching was only useful if movies to be shown clustered around a few popular titles (in other words, there was temporal locality).