Design of a Decentralized Video-on-Demand System with Cooperative Clients in Multicast Environment

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications have become a popular alternative solution to provide large-scale video-on-demand (VoD) services. Recent approaches are designed for streaming applications in a unicast infrastructure. As the successful deployment of IP broadcast delivery, the system could have a further improvement when broadcasting scheme can be coupled with P2P paradigm. In this paper, we develop a possible solution for building a VoD system using existing broadcasting protocol coupled with cooperative clients in multicast environment. The objective of this work mainly focuses on addressing one design issue in such framework: reliability. An analytical model is developed to determine the minimum number of cooperative clients required for the system. The results showed that 60 peers, each of which has the availability of 0.4, are enough to leverage the workload of the central server up to 95%, when the startup delay of the system is 10 minutes.