Scheduled video delivery-a scalable on-demand video delivery scheme

Continuous media, such as digital movies, video clips, and music, are becoming an increasingly common way to convey information, entertain and educate people. However, limited system and network resources have delayed the widespread usage of continuous media. Most existing on-demand services are not scalable for a large content repository. In this paper, we propose a scalable and inexpensive video delivery scheme, named Scheduled Video Delivery (SVD). In the SVD scheme, users submit requests with a specified start time. Incentives are provided so that users will specify the start times that reflect their real needs. The SVD system combines requests to form the multicasting groups and schedules these groups to meet the deadline. SVD scheduling has a different objective from many existing scheduling schemes. Its focus has been shifted from minimizing the waiting time toward meeting deadlines and at the same time combining requests to form multicasting groups. SVD compliments most existing video delivery schemes as it can be combined with them. It requires much less resources than other schemes. Simulation study for the SVD performance and the comparison to other schemes are presented.