An efficient video-on-demand model

The author proposes a design for an efficient video-on-demand system that u ses a practical, technologically sophisticated model to serve the home movi e-viewing needs of a wide audience, including meeting peak demand for popul ar, newly released films. In this VoD model, each customer's VoD terminal connects to a television se t and the network. Using the network, the customer contacts the VoD provide r to request a movie at a specific time. The movie plays without interrupti on unless the user decides to pause it. The VoD network's bandwidth permits data transfer at a rate equal to or exceeding the rate at which the TV con sumes the data. The terminal buffer's large capacity permits uninterrupted movie playing. The system includes the scheduling algorithm, buffer policy, file-storage l ayout, and a feedback mechanism for denying new requests when the system be comes nearly saturated. OEID-oneway elevator with interleaving and delayed start-includes a one-way elevator algorithm for each disk for each round an d provides double buffering for each video stream. Other features include interleaved movie file storage and transmission of a warning message when the terminal nears starvation. Interleaving with dela yed start offers the optimal strategy for storing movie files on disks beca use it permits maximum overlap of the read operations-seek, latency, and tr ansfer-over all disks, whereas striping overlaps only the transfer componen t. Also, OEID permits an almost perfectly balanced workload over all disks, on every round, regardless of movie popularity.