NeTS-NBD: Efficient Delivery of Video-on-Demand Streams to Heterogeneous Receivers

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0626861 SarhanVideo-on-Demand (VOD) provides customers with convenience, choice, and control. It employs streaming, which means the playback can start shortly after the user begins receiving the data as opposed to waiting for the entire video to download. Besides its use for entertainment, VOD has been of great importance in education, distance learning in particular. The required real-time and high-rate transfers for multimedia data severely limit the number of requests that can be serviced concurrently. Thus, numerous resource sharing techniques have been proposed to address this problem by servicing multiple requests for the same video using only one stream. The achieved resource sharing, however, is limited in real environments because of client heterogeneity, especially in terms of the download bandwidth. This research studies how VOD servers can support heterogeneous receivers while delivering data in a client-pull fashion. It develops new resource sharing schemes and scheduling policies that are well-suited for the heterogeneous environment and utilizes the unique characteristics of Layered Video Coding to provide a comprehensive and efficient solution. Moreover, it addresses the challenges caused by the variation in the available client bandwidth over time and the application of interactive operations. This research is expected to have significant impacts on the design of future VOD servers and the success of VOD services. Broader ImpactsThis research provides participating students with unique opportunities for learning multimedia server design and gaining important research experience. In addition, the department's graduate students greatly benefit from integrating the research results in new courses.