Capacity requirements for on-demand IPTV services

Service providers are evolving to provide more video content on-demand. Customers like to watch a variety of entertainment content of their choice and at their convenience. Serving this ever-increasing base of on-demand viewers requires careful provisioning by the providers to accommodate for both scale and interactivity. In this paper, we examine long-term usage patterns of hundreds of thousands of consumers of a nationwide IPTV service, and confirm that viewers are indeed migrating to what is called “time-shifted” viewing of television programming and movies using digital video recorders or on-demand viewing. We also examine the impact of such user´s interactive control of their viewing experience using “stream control” functions (e.g., fast-forward, rewind, skip, replay, etc.) Through careful measurements on an IPTV server, we compute the load due to video streaming and handling these stream control events. We then extrapolate from these micro-benchmark measurements to predict the processing load imposed by users that would resort to using a “network-based” DVR capability if such a service were offered. We use both detailed trace-driven simulations and a simple operational-analysis based model to predict the capacity requirements of the server complex in a video-hub office to serve a large population of customers (e.g., a densely populated city like Mumbai). We provide insights on the number of requests serviced by the server, the average time to service these requests and the response time as perceived by the client.