Home Boxes support for an efficient Video on Demand distribution

Video-on-Demand (VoD) streaming services have already acquired high popularity, which places hard requirements on Future Internet in terms of server and network bandwidth. Service scalability becomes then a crucial issue for which the server replication is the commonly used solution. However, this technique brings new challenges such as the server placement or the server selection. This paper presents an enhanced service oriented architecture with a new Home-Box layer that aims to provide a platform for efficient VoD streaming service. A popularity-based video contents placement in Home-Boxes and a two-steps end-users´ requests redirection are also proposed and evaluated through simulation. The results confirm the promising aspects that motivate the considering of the Home-Box node in the video delivery chain.