Server Capacity Requirements for Interactive VOD

A true video-on-demand (TVOD) system allows users to request and view any video at any time, with full VCR capabilities, but its server resource consumption is very huge. A new stream scheduling scheme, called Regular Multicast Fixed Scheduling (RMFS), was proposed to support VCR controls. RMFS schedules the regular multicast stream periodically to assure the existence of the target stream during stream merging. The optimal multicast interval and server capacity requirements for RMFS were both analyzed. Simulation results show that RMFS scales well, and can reduce server resource by as much as 91.7% compared to TVOD, even at high interactive level.