Edge Station in Access Networks for Video Distribution

A video distribution architecture with edge stations and Fast Ethernet as connection to residential homes is described in this paper. The edge station is con gurable and controllable by a central server. It is placed in the residential access network and has multiple usages. Due to its large storage space it can be used as a mirroring/caching proxy for continuous media. Replicating popular video contents in many small mirroring sites can signi cantly reduce the network bandwidth requirement. It can also be used as a web caching proxy. When this structure is used with a cable or Hybrid Fiber/Coax (HFC) network, it turns to be a Hybrid Fiber/Coax/Ethernet (HFCE) structure, particularly suitable for Video-on-Demand (VoD) applications. There are many advantages of this architecture. First, the central server load and network traAEc can be reduced to a small percentage. Second, the response time of most video playing requests can be signi cantly reduced, and it is simple to provide interactive functions such as fast-forward, fast-backward, and jump. Third, true VoD can possibly be provided with a one-way cable system. Finally, noise from STBs is absorbed by the edge station in a two-way cable system. This architecture is originally proposed for the cable network, but it can be applied to other networks such as DSL.