Stochastic modelling and analysis of video on demand system with VCR functionalities

Recently multimedia streaming applications have become popular for the dissemination of video content both for academic and commercial purposes. Large scale dissemination of video streaming with an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS) is challenging due to non-uniform, dynamically changing and best-effort services provided by the underlying Internet. This challenge becomes multifold when VCR functionalities such as Jump, Back, Stop, Pause etc. are also provided with video streaming applications. In this paper, we present the stochastic modelling and analysis of a distributed VoD (Video on Demand) streaming application with VCR functionalities to reason about desired network characteristics for acceptable QoS. We use a simple VoD system with centralised server as our basic example. We model this system as Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) process and utilize PRISM model checker for the analysis. The analysis is performed in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, jitter, error rate and frame loss rate. This analysis provides a basis to decide the threshold of loss rate of underlying network for an acceptable QoS.