Maximizing the profit of VOD service on broadband cable networks

Bandwidth contention is still a challenging problem in providing efficient IP-based video-on-demand (VOD) service on broadband cable networks (BCNs), due to the lack of effective approaches to exploit the unique characteristics of BCNs. To address this issue, we have designed an optimal full-sharing (Dong Y et al., 2003) for VOD service over a single channel, which maximizes the number of simultaneous video sessions on the single channel. In this paper, we further extend our optimal scheduling for VOD service over multiple channels. We first analyze the expected session bandwidth of a video and then develop an efficient video assignment mechanism for maximizing the profit of a VOD system.