Efficient Wireless Access to Video-on-Demand Services

The problem of providing an efficient and low-cost video streaming service over wireless access networks is considered in this work. The usage of multicast content delivery combined with popularity-based video caching, enables to provide video-on-demand services over wireless networks. In order to tackle the "last mile" bottleneck for video delivery to the home, we propose a content-aware architecture, that incorporates popularity-dependent video caching and patching with application-enabled multicast content delivery. The proposed method offers a tremendous bandwidth saving, in comparison with the individual service currently exists in wireless networks. We analyze the conditions under which multicast content delivery offers a better QoS, in terms of service delay, over the individual service currently used for video streaming.