Smoothing and prefetching video from distributed servers

Video prefetching has been proposed previously for the transmission of variable-bit-rate (VBR) video over a packet-switched network. The objective of these protocols is to prefetch future frames to be stored at the customer´s set-top box (STB) in periods of low link utilization. Experimental results have shown that video prefetching is very effective and it achieves much higher network utilization (i.e. larger number of simultaneous connections) than the traditional video smoothing schemes. Video prefetching, however can only be efficiently implemented when there is one centralized server that serves the different customers over a common link. In a distributed environment there is a large degradation in its performance. In this paper we introduce a new scheme that utilizes smoothing along with prefetching, to overcome the problem of distributed prefetching. We show that our scheme performs almost as well as the centralized prefetching protocol even though it is implemented in a distributed environment.