Experience in designing a TCP/IP based VOD system over a dedicated network

We address the problem of designing a TCP/IP based VOD system over a dedicated network. Despite of the general belief that TCP/IP is not suitable for real-time multimedia applications, after testing in a laboratory environment for one year, we are confident in announcing that our prototype is both efficient and reliable. This success depends on several important factors. First of all, the system operates on a dedicated network in which there exists no other traffic except a small amount of background traffic generated by the Ether Switch, the major network component used by our prototype. Second, the system overhead due to the VOD server and the network adaptor card is minimized. Third, we maximize the disk bandwidth by implementing a proprietary disk file system. Our experiment shows that it requires only about 330 KBytes at the client buffer to smooth packet delay jitters.