Design and analysis of scalable and interactive near video-on-demand systems

The design of interactive Video-on-Demand (VOD) systems is highly complicated when scalable stream merging is used. Support of requests under the Near Video-on-Demand (NVOD), where not all requests are serviced immediately, introduces additional complications. We develop an overall solution for designing interactive NVOD systems when stream merging is employed. The proposed solution supports user interactions with short response times and low rejection probabilities. In addition, we propose an efficient dynamic stream allocation policy and use a sophisticated client-side cache management policy. We analyze system performance, through extensive simulation, using realistic workload under different levels of user interactivity.