Scheduling Video Streams in Video-on-Demand Systems: A Survey

  • Authors:
  • Debasish Ghose;Hyoung Joong Kim

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India. dghose@aero.iisc.ernet.in;Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon 200-701, Korea. khj@cc.kangwon.ac.kr

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Developments in multimedia technology over the pastdecade has caused video-on-demand services to emerge as a newparadigm in home entertainment. Because of the large volume of datainvolved in the process and stringent continuity and real-timeconstraints, these services pose challenges that are different fromthe standard file transfer operations in the network. The necessityof efficient usage of scarce resources like network bandwidth andserver capacity (in terms of I/O bandwidth) demands novel andeasy-to-use schemes for scheduling continuous video streams. Thispaper presents an overview of the major scheduling policies that haveemerged in the recent past. In particular, the paper providesdetailed discussion on policies based on principles of broadcasting,batching, caching, and piggybacking or merging. Policies likelook-ahead scheduling schemes that are designed exclusively toprovide certain interactive VCR-like control operations are alsocovered. A conceptual comparison between the various classes ofscheduling policies is carried out to identify common threads and keyconcepts. Performance of these policies in terms of bandwidth demandreduction, customer waiting time reduction, provision of interactivecontrol by the user, and fairness of service are given specialemphasis. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possibleavenues of further reasearch and development in this potentiallyinteresting and challenging field.