Demand paging for video-on-demand servers

Abstract

With recent advances in storage and network technology it is now possible to provide video on demand (VOD) service, thereby eliminating the inflexibility inherent in today's broadcast cable systems. A VOD server is a computer system that stores videos in compressed digital form and provides support for the concurrent transmission of different portions of the compressed video data to the various viewers. We present novel demand paging algorithms that provide rate guarantees while utilizing the limited buffer space effectively and eliminating the disk bandwidth limitation. Our schemes, therefore, increase the number of clients that can be serviced concurrently. A VOD server, which is based on our schemes, is currently being implemented at AT&T.