Modeling of video-on-demand networks with server selection

A video-on-demand (VoD) system allows a viewer to choose a video of his choice such as movies, electronic encyclopedia or educational videos, which is delivered to him real time via a network. This paper is a performance study of a distributed video server system in a fully connected backbone network. The nature of the VoD service requires massive storage from the video server and massive bandwidth from the network. Our analytical model can be used to determine the blocking probability of video requests and the requirements of network bandwidth given the capacity of video servers and hence the trade-off in communication and storage costs. Video requests often can be served by a number of servers. We have also designed and compared two server selection strategies.