A scalable, low-cost VoD server with multicast support

Undoubtedly, video-on-demand technology will play a catalytic role in future entertainment and e-learning systems. The key challenge in VoD domain is to provide interactive services in thousands of potential users at a reasonable cost. We present a scalable, high performance, high availability and low cost VoD system design, based on a cluster of personal computer. The scalability of this design is not restricted to cluster-level, but it can easily be applied to a greater MAN-level. The experimental measurements indicated that our design can support simultaneously 90, 170 or 240 high quality video streams for implementations with 1, 2 or 3 server nodes respectively. We show, using queuing theory analysis that these figures correspond to thousands of real users. We also present a multicast method that further enriches our design increasing its reliability in periods of high demand.