Algorithms for Media-on-Demand Systems

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This research involves media-on-demand systems. A media-on-demand system is a distributed network system where servers respond to demands by clients to receive various types of media such as video, audio, or large files. Such systems may be implemented within an organization like a hotel or a university, or over the Internet. Currently, Internet media-on-demand systems use unicast, meaning that each client receives its own transmission. This method does not scale up well for popular media where hundreds of thousands of requests might be received in a short time. Thus today, for example, hotels providing movies-on-demand typically make customers wait up to an hour for starting times. In this research, the principal investigator studies algorithms for systems where multicast or broadcast is available and buffer storage is adequate. Tradeoffs among server bandwidth, startup delay, client receive bandwidth and client buffer size are studied. In particular, new algorithms and mathematical analyses are developed to explore these tradeoffs. The main goal of the research is to understand how to achieve the highest Quality of Service with as few resources as possible.