Efficient movie retrieval strategies for movie-on-demand multimedia services on distributed networks

Abstract

In this paper, for a network-based multimedia Video/Movie-on-demand(VoD/MoD) service, we design and analyze efficient retrieval strategies to minimize both the access times of the movies and the block rates. We consider a heterogeneous set of servers and a generic network topology in which clients can request for movies from any site. We design and analyze a multiple servers retrieval strategy (MSRS) to retrieve the movies requested by the clients and present a rigorous analysis on its performance with respect to access times of the requested movies and the block rates. A generalized approach of MSRS is designed in a judicious manner using a two-step approach. In the first step, we partition the available bandwidth among the requested movies and in the second step, we derive optimal portions of the movies to be retrieved from each of the servers for each movie, based on allocated bandwidths in the first step. Thus, with the optimal playback portions of the movies using aggregate retrieval bandwidth from several servers, the access times of the movies are minimized. In the first step, in addition to the access times, we minimize the block rates by balancing the total accesses/requests among the servers. In generating the retrieval schedule, our scheme utilizes the available bandwidth (resource) among the servers and guarantees to use less buffer space than a single server retrieval strategy (SSRS). With this two-step approach, a complete flexibility is provided in tuning the access times of the movies and also shown to be robust to any variations in the user access rates of the movies, in reality. Rigorous simulation experiments are presented to observe the performance of MSRS with respect to some important system dependent parameters. Comparing with SSRS, MSRS shows better performance in the simulation.