A design tool for dependable video on demand applications

This work presents a simulation-based tool for dependability-oriented design of Video on Demand (VoD) applications. The tool provides a variety of features to rapidly model fundamental components and functions of VoD applications over distributed architectures. Some of the potentialities of the tool are demonstrated by applying it to the analysis of a real system prototype. System ability to cope with data corruption and server failures is evaluated with respect to different potential data redundancy techniques, and detection and scrubbing policies. The contribution of this work is twofold First, it provides a flexible and versatile template for efficient and accurate simulation of distributed systems for VoD applications. Second, it shows that models and techniques developed for traditional fault tolerant system design can be re-targeted, in order to address specific issues of VoD applications