Admission control for distributed VoD system with scalable videos

Scalable video coding (SVC) is considered as a promising video coding scheme under the new network environment. However, providing scalable videos in a distributed video on demand (VoD) system brings many additional problems, such as the adjustment of QoS according to varying terminal capabilities or network conditions, the ensurance of providing acceptable video quality while avoiding network congestion etc. This paper proposes a novel admission control model for distributed VoD system with scalable videos. The admission control process of the service system is modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The admission control policy of the system is a randomized policy which can be solved by policy gradient method. Through a numerical experiment, the proposed approach is shown to be well performed.