A Fully Scalable and Distributed Architecture for Video-on-Demand

Abstract

In spite of the attractiveness of Video-on-demand (VoD) services, their implantation to the present has not been as widespread as could have been desired due to centralized VoD systems have a limited streaming capacity and its grown is costly. One level proxy-based systems have been proposed to increase the system capacity but their scalability are still limited by the main network bandwidth. Our investigation are focussed on designing a flexible LVoD (large-scale Video-on-Demand) system capable of easy scaling with limited costs, which can adapt its size to the needs of the system. To achieve a scalable LVoD system, it is essential that the communications system bandwidth is able to grow in keeping with system growth (with a reasonable cost and limited loss of efficiency). To get these requirements we have proposed a hierarchical tree topology based on the use of independent local networks with proxies. To allow the system’s grow, the functionality of the proxy has been modified in such a way that it works at the same time as cache for the most watched movies, and as a mirror for the remaining movies. The evaluation of these systems has been done using an analytical model. The results shows that this architecture guarantees unlimited and low-cost growth for LVoD systems, the VoD system capacity can easily be adapted to any number of users and the system is fault-tolerant.