Video distribution to the home using advance reservation

Through the Internet and service providers such as cable companies it will be possible to receive a wide range of services such as Internet access, video distribution and television in the home. However, a bottleneck in these systems is the bandwidth available to the home and over the cable tv network. In this paper, the use of advance reservation for non-interactive services is proposed to alleviate the problem of limited bandwidth and allow for more services to a wider range of customers. Simulation is used to study the performance of video distribution with advance reservation compared to on-demand service. It is shown that by merging requests, advance reservation significantly increases the amount of traffic the system can handle while still maintaining low delays. It is also shown that the demand system is more susceptible to load increases than the reservation traffic.