130
1, MARCH 2003
Design of an Interactive Video-on-Demand System
Yiu-Wing Leung, Senior Member, IEEE, and Tony K. C. Chan
Abstract—We design an interactive video-on-demand (VOD)
system using both the client–server paradigm and the broad-
cast delivery paradigm. Between the VOD warehouse and the
customers, we adopt a client–server paradigm to provide an inter-
active service. Within the VOD warehouse, we adopt a broadcast
delivery paradigm to support many concurrent customers. In
particular, we exploit the enormous bandwidth of optical fibers
for broadcast delivery, so that the system can provide many video
program and maintain a small access delay. In addition, we design
and adopt an interleaved broadcast delivery scheme, so that every
video stream only requires a small buffer size for temporary
storage. A simple proxy is allocated to each ongoing customer, and
it retrieves video from the optical channels and delivers the video
to the customer through an information network. The proposed
VOD system is suitable for large scale applications with many
customers, and it has several desirable features: 1) it can be scaled
up to serve more concurrent customers and provide more video
programs, 2) it provides interactive operations, 3) it only requires
point-to-point communication between the VOD warehouse and
the customer and it does not involve any network control, 4) it has
a small access delay, and 5) it requires a small buffer size for each
video stream.
Index Terms—Broadcast delivery paradigm, client-server pro-
gram, video-on-demand.
I. INTRODUCTION
A N INTERACTIVE video-on-demand (VOD) system pro-
vides an electronic video rental service to geographically
distributed customers [1]. It retrieves video programs from its
storage and delivers them to the customers through an informa-
tion network. The customers can select and watch video pro-
grams at their convenient time and place, and they can interact
with the programs via interactive operations such as pause, fast-
forward, and rewind.
A VOD system has to serve multiple customers concurrently,
and therefore it must have a large enough capacity to provide
multiple video streams. Many designs have been proposed for
this purpose and they can be classified into two categories:
client–server design and broadcasting design.
A. Client–Server Design
The client–server design adopts the client–server paradigm.
The system is composed of one or more servers [2], [3]. It main-
tains a dedicated video stream for each ongoing customer. When
the customer performs an interactive operation, the system re-
trieves and delivers the corresponding video for him. This de-
Manuscript received February 29, 2000; revised May 30, 2001. The associate
editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publica-
tion was Dr. Thomas R. Gardos.
The authors are with the Department of Computer Science, Hong
Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong (e-mail: ywleung@
comp.hkbu.edu.hk; tkcchan@hkbu.edu.hk).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMM.2003.808818
1520-9210/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 5, NO.
sign can provide an ideal interactive service to the customers,
but it needs dedicated resources (such as I/O bandwidth) to
maintain a video stream for each ongoing customer. For large
scale applications with many customers, this design requires
large amount of resources.
A client–server design can use a batching policy [4]–[8] to
serve more concurrent customers. The main idea is that the
system waits for a time interval (called batch window) to collect
a batch of requests for a video program. Then the system creates
one video stream for this program and multicasts it to a batch of
customers. In this manner, one video stream can serve multiple
customers simultaneously. However, the customers have to wait
before starting a VOD session (the waiting time is called access
delay) and they cannot perform (or can only perform some con-
strained) interactive operations. Several batching policies have
been proposed in the literature and they are as follows.
• Dan et al. [5] proposed that when the system can establish
a new video stream, it selects the batch with the largest
number of waiting customers and creates a video stream to
serve all the customers in this batch. This batching policy
can minimize the mean access delay, but some customers
may experience long access delay.
• Dan et al. [6] proposed to choose a shorter batch window
for the more popular video programs. They developed an
analytical model and determined the window size for each
video program.
• Almeroth et al. [7] proposed a batching policy that sup-
ports some constrained interactive operations by buffering
a certain portion of the video program or joining the cus-
tomer to another existing video stream.
• Liao and Li [8] proposed a batching policy called
split-and-merge. When a customer performs an interac-
tive operation, the system splits him from his original
video stream and attempts to create a new video stream
for him. If this is not possible, the customers waits. Once
the interaction is done, the system attempts to merge this
customer back to an existing video stream via buffering.
If this is not possible, the customer waits.
B. Broadcasting Design
The broadcasting design adopts the broadcast delivery par-
adigm [9], [10] to serve many concurrent customers. There are
three broadcasting designs for VOD [11]–[13].
The first design is called periodic broadcasting [11]. It
broadcasts multiple streams of the same video program at
staggered times periodically. To watch a video program, a
customer waits until a new video stream for this program is
broadcast and then he receives this stream. The system can
serve many concurrent customers because many customers
can receive the same video stream from a broadcast channel
simultaneously. However, it has a long mean access delay or
LEUNG AND CHAN: DESIGN OF AN INTERACTIVE VOD SYSTEM 131

(a)

Fig. 1. VOD system architecture.

it requires many broadcast channels per video program. For

example, if a 90-min video program is broadcast every 10 min,
the mean access delay is 5 min and it requires nine broadcast
channels. To support interactive operations, a low-resolution
version of each video program is prepared and stored, and it is
delivered to the customers upon requests using a client–server
paradigm.
The second design is called staggered VOD [12]. It is similar
to periodic broadcasting, but it provides interactive operations
in a different manner. To perform an interactive operation, a
customer changes to receive another broadcast video stream if
it exists. To produce a good interactive effect, the staggering
interval should be small but this would require a large number
of broadcast channels. For example, if the staggering interval
is 1 min, then a 90-min video program requires 90 broadcast
channels.
The third design is called pyramid broadcasting [13]. It di- (b)
vides each video program into segments of increasing sizes,
and broadcasts the th segment of all the video programs period- Fig. 2. Multiple optical fibers can be used to provide a large number of video
programs. (a) Every proxy is tapped to one of the optical fibers. (b) Every proxy
ically in the th broadcast channel. The bit rate of each broadcast is tapped to any one of the optical fibers via a directional coupler.
channel is significantly larger than the video playback rate, es-
pecially when the number of video programs is large. For this
reason, every customer must have a fast receiver and a large • The system only involves point-to-point communication
storage space. between the VOD warehouse and a customer. This type
of communication can be supported by many existing net-
C. A New Design work infrastructures. In contrast, some existing VOD de-
signs assume that the network can support multicasting or
In this paper, we adopt both the client–server paradigm and broadcasting.
the broadcast delivery paradigm to design an interactive VOD • The system does not involve any network control. This
system for large scale applications with many customers. This is important when the network is not owned and man-
system has several desirable features. aged by the VOD service provider. In contrast, some
• The system can be scaled up to serve more concurrent existing designs involve network control such as dynamic
customers and provide more video programs. multicasting.
• The system provides interactive operations which are ap- • The access delay is small (say, 30 s). In contrast, the access
proximations of the ideal ones. The customer can control delay in the client–server designs with batching policies
the pause duration, the fast forward rate and the fast rewind and the broadcasting designs is significantly longer (say,
rate. several minutes).
132
• Each video stream only requires a small buffer size for
temporary storage.
II. SYSTEM DESIGN
A. Basic System Architecture
Fig. 1 shows the proposed VOD system. The customers are
connected to a VOD warehouse through an information net-
work. The information network can be a private network owned
by the VOD service provider, or it can be a public network. A
customer makes requests via a low bit rate channel, and the VOD
warehouse delivers the requested video to this customer via a
high bit-rate channel. Both channels are point-to-point.
Within the VOD warehouse, the video archives store video
programs. Each video program is organized into pages, where
every page lasts for the same duration.
The video archives are connected to an optical fiber, which
provides logical channels by wavelength division mul-
tiplexing [14]. The pages of each video program are read
from the storage and are broadcast cyclically over multiple
optical channels according to a broadcast delivery scheme.
This scheme specifies the time and channel for broadcasting
every page. We will design two broadcast delivery schemes in
Section III.
There are proxies tapped to the optical fiber, where a proxy
is a simple logical unit for reception and transmission. When
a customer initiates a new VOD session, the system allocates
a free proxy to him. The proxy receives the requested video
from the optical channels, and transmits it to the customer at
the video playback rate through an information network. When
the customer terminates the VOD session, the associated proxy
will be released.
B. Scalability
As the VOD service becomes more popular, the system has to
serve more concurrent customers and provide more video pro-
grams. The proposed VOD system is scalable to cope with these
future expansions.
To serve more concurrent customers, we add more proxies.
It is not necessary to modify the existing hardware, and it is
only necessary to modify the software setting to manage a larger
number of proxies (e.g., to record which proxies are free).
To provide more video programs, we add storage and optical
fibers if the existing ones are not sufficient. When there are mul-
tiple fibers, each proxy can be tapped to one of them [Fig. 2(a)],
or it can be tapped to any one of them via a directional coupler
[15] [Fig. 2(b)].
If the VOD service covers a wide area (e.g., an entire country),
we can replicate the VOD warehouse in distributed sites and
each warehouse serves its nearest customers. This can avoid
using long-distance channels, and reduce the propagation delay
to give a better response time for interactive operations.
III. BROADCAST DELIVERY SCHEMES
In this section, we design two broadcast delivery schemes
for broadcasting each video program over the optical channels.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 5, NO. 1, MARCH 2003
Fig. 3. Basic broadcast delivery scheme.
These schemes are called basic broadcast delivery and inter-
leaved broadcast delivery. We let be the bit rate of each op-
tical channel and be the video playback rate.
A. Basic Broadcast Delivery
For clarity, we adopt the following case for explanation. A
video program consists of pages and these pages are
broadcast over channels. Generalization to any and
is straightforward.
1) Delivery Schedule: Fig. 3 shows the basic broadcast de-
livery scheme. Time is divided into cycles where all the pages
are broadcast once in a cycle. Each cycle is further divided into
slots where one page is broadcast in one slot in a channel.
We let the duration of a cycle and a slot be and respectively
where . The first three pages are broadcast in channel 1
one after the other. Similarly, the next three pages are broadcast
in channel 2; and the last three pages are broadcast in channel 3
(see Fig. 3).
Fig. 4(a) shows how the proxy retrieves the pages from the op-
tical channels, and Fig. 4(b) shows how to deliver these pages to
the customer. First of all, the proxy tunes its receiver to channel
1, and waits until the beginning of the coming cycle. Then it re-
trieves page 1 from channel 1, and at the same time delivers this
page to the customer at the video playback rate (a slower
rate) through an information network. After retrieving page 1,
the proxy does not retrieve in the next slots but it con-
tinues to deliver the remaining portion of page 1 to the customer
[see Fig. 4(b)]. In the second and third cycles, the proxy does
similar steps to retrieve and deliver page 2 and page 3 respec-
tively, and the details are shown in Fig. 4(a) and (b). After re-
trieving page 3 from channel 1, the proxy does not retrieve in
the next slots (i.e., cycle 4) but it continues to deliver the
remaining portion of page 3 to the customer. At the same time,
it tunes its receiver to channel 2 so that it will be able to retrieve
page 4, page 5, and page 6 in the fifth, sixth, and seventh cy-
cles respectively. Then, the proxy tunes its receiver to channel
3 to retrieve page 7, page 8, and page 9 in the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh cycles respectively. In this manner, the proxy can de-
liver video to the customer continuously [Fig. 4(b)].
2) Buffer Size, Tuning Time, and Slot Duration: The proxy
retrieves video at the channel bit rate (say, 50 Mbps) for one
slot and then waits for one cycle. At the same time, it continu-
ously delivers video at the video playback rate (say, 1.5 Mbps).
LEUNG AND CHAN: DESIGN OF AN INTERACTIVE VOD SYSTEM 133

(a)

(b)
Fig. 4. Basic broadcast delivery for VOD. (a) Proxy retrieves the shaded pages. (b) Proxy delivers the retrieved pages to the customer.

Therefore, it must have buffer for temporary storage. To deter- livery rate, the buffer occupancy is increasing with
mine the buffer size required, we analyze the buffer occupancy time until it reaches a maximum at the end of this
in the proxy. Fig. 4(c) shows the buffer occupancy versus time, slot. The maximum buffer occupancy is equal to
as follows. retrieval rate delivery rate duration of a slot
• In the first slot of the first cycle, the proxy retrieves .
page 1 and delivers it to the customer simultane- • In the subsequent slots, the proxy does not re-
ously. Since the retrieval rate is faster than the de- trieve any page but it still delivers the remaining portion
134 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 5, NO. 1, MARCH 2003

(c)
Fig. 4. (Continued.) Basic broadcast delivery for VOD. (c) Buffer occupancy in the proxy versus time. The buffer size required by the proxy is R T.

of page 1 to the customer. Therefore, the buffer occupancy

is decreasing with time until the end of the first slot of the
second cycle. At this time instance, the buffer occupancy
is zero.
The above pattern is repeated and the details are shown in
Fig. 4(c). Since the maximum buffer occupancy is , the
proxy requires a buffer size of bits.
When the proxy has retrieved all the pages from one channel,
it tunes its receiver to another channel. We see from Fig. 4(a) that
tuning must be done within one cycle. Therefore, the maximum Fig. 5. Interleaved broadcast delivery scheme.
permissible tuning time is seconds. is at least several sec-
onds in practice (see the design examples in Section V-C), while section, we apply interleaving to enhance the basic broadcast
the tuning time of the current optical receivers ranges from sev- delivery scheme so that the buffer size required by each proxy
eral milliseconds to several microseconds [15]. Therefore, the can be reduced. For clarity, we adopt the following case for ex-
tuning speed is not a concern in practice. planation. A video program consists of pages and these
The slot duration depends on , and . It can be ex- pages are broadcast over channels. Generalization to any
pressed in terms of these quantities as follows. A cycle has p
and is straightforward.
slots and its duration is , and so the slot duration is .A
1) Delivery Schedule: The main idea is to divide each page
proxy retrieves a page from an optical channel in one slot at rate
into minipages, and interleave them in a cycle so that each
, and so a page contains bits. The proxy delivers this
proxy is only required to store at most one minipage at any time.
page to the customer in slots at rate , and so a page
Consequently, the proxy only requires a small buffer size.
contains bits. By equating these two quantities,
Page is divided into minipages, which are referred to as
we have . Therefore, the duration of a slot
is equal to . minipages . Time is divided into cycles, a cycle is
divided into slots, and a slot is further divided into
minislots where a minipage is broadcast in one minislot in a
B. Interleaved Broadcast Delivery
channel.
In the previous studies [11], [16], interleaving was proposed Fig. 5 shows the interleaved broadcast delivery scheme.
to reduce the buffer size for VOD storage systems. In this sub- In every cycle, three consecutive pages are broadcast in each
LEUNG AND CHAN: DESIGN OF AN INTERACTIVE VOD SYSTEM
(a)
Fig. 6. Interleaved broadcast delivery for VOD. (a) Proxy retrieves the shaded pages.
channel, and their minipages are interleaved over nine minis-
lots. Specifically, we broadcast the minipages of pages 1, 2,
and 3 in channel 1, as follows:
• broadcast their first minipages one after the other (i.e.,
minipage , then , and then );
• broadcast their second minipages one after the other (i.e.,
minipage , then , and then ;
• broadcast their third minipages one after the other (i.e.,
minipage , then , and then ).
In channel 2, we broadcast the minipages of pages 4, 5, and 6
in a similar fashion but in a different order: broadcast their third
minipages, then their first minipages, and then their second
minipages. In channel 3, we broadcast the minipages of pages
7, 8, and 9 in another order: broadcast their second minipages,
then their third minipages, and then their first minipages.
Fig. 6(a) shows how the proxy retrieves the minipages from
the optical channels. In the first cycle, it retrieves minipage
in the first minislot, then retrieves minipage in the fourth
minislot, and then retrieves minipage in the seventh minislot.
In the second and third cycles, the proxy retrieves minipages ,
135
, , , , in a similar manner, and the details are shown
in Fig. 6(a).
After retrieving all the minipages from channel 1, the proxy
tunes its receiver to channel 2. It retrieves minipage in the
fourth minislot of the fourth cycle, then retrieves minipage
in the seventh minislot of the fourth cycle, and then retrieves
minipage in the first minislot of the fifth cycle. The proxy
retrieves minipages , , , , , in a similar fashion,
and the details are shown in Fig. 6(a).
After retrieving all the minipages from channel 2, the
proxy tunes its receiver to channel 3 to retrieve minipages
. The details are shown in Fig. 6(a).
We note that the proxy waits for minislots after retrieving
the last minipage of a page, and it waits for minislots
after retrieving any other minipage. To ensure continuous video
delivery, a page (or minipages) must last for one cycle and
one minislot.
The proxy delivers the minipages to the customer as follows.
When it starts to retrieve a minipage, it starts to deliver this
minipage to the customer. It continuously delivers the minipages
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(b)
(c)
Fig. 6. (Continued.) Interleaved broadcast delivery for VOD. (b) Proxy
delivers the retrieved pages to the customer. (c) Buffer occupancy in the proxy
versus time. The buffer size required by the proxy is equal to x = R T =m.
to the customers one after the other, and Fig. 6(b) shows the
details.
2) Buffer Size, Tuning Time, and Minislot Duration: To de-
termine the buffer size required by each proxy, we analyze its
buffer occupancy versus time as follows [see Fig. 6(c)]:
• In the first minislot, the proxy retrieves minipage and
delivers it to the customer simultaneously. Since the
retrieval rate is larger than the delivery rate, the buffer
occupancy is increasing with time until the end of
this minislot. At this time instance, the buffer occu-
pancy is equal to retrieval rate delivery rate
duration of a minislot . C. Comparison
• In the second and third minislots, the proxy stops retrieval
but it is still delivering the remaining portion of minipage
to the customer. Therefore, the buffer occupancy is de-
creasing with time until the end of the third minislot. At
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 5, NO. 1, MARCH 2003
TABLE I
BASIC BROADCAST DELIVERY VERSUS INTERLEAVED BROADCAST DELIVERY
this time instance, the buffer occupancy is equal to
delivery rate duration of two minislots .
• In the fourth minislot, the proxy retrieves and delivers
minipage . As a result, the buffer occupancy is
increasing with time again until the end of this min-
islot. At this time instance, the buffer occupancy
is equal to retrieval rate delivery rate
duration of a minislot .
• In the fifth and sixth minislots, the proxy stops retrieval but
it is still delivering the remaining portion of minipage .
Therefore, the buffer occupancy is decreasing with time
until the end of the sixth minislot. At this time instance,
the buffer occupancy is equal to delivery rate
duration of two minislots .
• In the seventh minislot, the proxy retrieves and de-
livers minipage and hence the buffer occupancy is
increasing with time again. At the end of this minislot,
the buffer occupancy is equal to retrieval rate
delivery rate duration of a minislot .
• In the subsequent three minislots, the proxy stops retrieval
but continues delivery until all the bits in the buffer have
been delivered. At the end of the first minislot of the
second cycle, the buffer occupancy becomes zero.
The above pattern of buffer occupancy repeats for the subse-
quent minipages [see Fig. 6(c)]. Since the maximum buffer oc-
cupancy is , the proxy requires a buffer size of
bits.
When the proxy has retrieved all the minipages from one
channel, it tunes its receiver to another channel. We see from
Fig. 6(a) that tuning must be done within minislots. In other
words, the maximum permissible tuning time is seconds.
The minislot duration depends on , , and . It can
be expressed in terms of these quantities as follows. A cycle has
minislots and its duration is , and so the minislot dura-
tion is . A proxy retrieves minipages of a page from
an optical channel in respective minislots at rate , and so
these minipages contain a total of bits. The proxy de-
livers these minipages to the customer in minislots at
rate , and so these minipages contain
bits. By equating these two quantities, we have
. Therefore, the duration of a minislot is equal to
.
We have presented two broadcast delivery schemes. These
schemes require different buffer size per proxy and different
permissible tuning time, and Table I shows a comparison. In-
terleaved broadcast delivery is more attractive as it requires a
LEUNG AND CHAN: DESIGN OF AN INTERACTIVE VOD SYSTEM
(a) (b)
Fig. 7. Pause operation. (a) Ideal pause operation. (b) Approximate pause
operation.
(a) (b)
Fig. 8. Fast forward operation. (a) Ideal fast forward operation.
(b) Approximate fast forward operation.
much smaller buffer size per proxy. In addition, as we will
explain in Section IV, it can also support better interactive
operations.
IV. PROVISION OF INTERACTIVE OPERATIONS
In this section, we describe a set of interactive operations
which are approximations of the ideal ones, and explain how
the proposed VOD system can provide these approximate oper-
ations. Our explanation will be based on the interleaved broad-
cast delivery scheme, but the ideas are also applicable to the
basic broadcast delivery scheme.
A. Pause
Fig. 7(a) shows the ideal pause operation. When the customer
issues a pause command, the playout point of the video program
is “frozen,” and the pause duration can be any positive value.
Fig. 7(b) shows the approximate pause operation, in which the
pause duration is an integral multiple of the cycle duration . If
is smaller, the approximate pause operation is more similar
to the ideal one.
The proposed VOD system can provide the approximate
pause operation as follows. When a customer issues a pause
command to the proxy at time , the proxy stops retrieval/de-
livery temporarily. When the customer issues a resume
command at time , the proxy resumes retrieval/delivery at
the playout point where it is paused. In other words, the proxy
resumes retrieval/delivery at time where is an integer
such that . minipage and then skips some previous minipages [e.g., see
B. Fast Forward
Fig. 8(a) shows the ideal fast forward operation. When the
customer issues a fast forward command, the video program is
137
(a)
(b)
Fig. 9. Realization of approximate fast forward operation; the proxy only
retrieves and delivers the shaded pages. (a) Realization at the page level.
(b) Realization at the minipage level.
played at a faster and constant rate. Fig. 8(b) shows the approx-
imate fast forward operation. It plays a small portion of video at
the normal rate, then skips a portion, then plays a small portion,
and then skips a portion, etc.
The approximate fast forward operation can be realized at the
page level or minipage level. If it is realized at the page level,
it plays a page and then skips some subsequent pages [e.g.,
see Fig. 9(a)]; if it is realized at the minipage level, it plays a
minipage and then skips some subsequent minipages [e.g., see
Fig. 9(b)]. In general, if the cycle duration is shorter, the approx-
imation is closer to the ideal one. In particular, the realization at
the minipage level is better than that at the page level because a
minipage lasts for a shorter duration.
C. Fast Rewind
Fig. 10(a) shows the ideal fast rewind operation. When the
customer issues a fast rewind command, the video program is
played in the reverse order at a fast and constant rate. Fig. 10(b)
shows the approximate fast rewind operation. It plays a small
portion of video at the normal rate, then skips a previous portion,
then plays a small portion, and then skips a previous portion, etc.
The approximate fast rewind operation can be realized at the
page level or minipage level. If it is realized at the page level,
it plays a page and then skips some previous pages [e.g., see
Fig. 11(a)]; if it is realized at the minipage level, it plays a
Fig. 11(b)]. In general, if the cycle duration is shorter, the ap-
proximation is closer to the ideal one. In particular, the realiza-
tion at the minipage level is better than that at the page level
because a minipage lasts for a shorter duration.
138
(a) (b)
Fig. 10. Fast rewind operation. (a) Ideal fast rewind operation.
(b) Approximate fast rewind operation.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 11. Realization of approximate fast rewind operation; the proxy only
retrieves and delivers the shaded pages. (a) Realization at the page level.
(b) Realization at the minipage level.
V. DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS AND EXAMPLES
A. Design Issues
Proxy: Each proxy is a simple logical unit for reception and
transmission. It receives one page per cycle and therefore its
receiver is utilized in only one of the p slots in each cycle.
Therefore, multiple proxies can share a receiver. They can also
share a transmitter for outgoing delivery. For example, if ATM
links at 155 Mbps/link are used for outgoing delivery and is
1.5 Mbps, 103 proxies can share a transmitter for one ATM link.
To simplify implementation, multiple proxies can reside on the
same physical unit for sharing.
Cost-effectiveness: To serve one additional concurrent cus-
tomer, it is only necessary to add one proxy and it is not nec-
essary to add the other resources. The cost required is small.
Therefore, the proposed system is more cost-effective for larger
scale applications with many customers.
Optical bandwidth: The proposed system uses an optical fiber
within the VOD warehouse. An optical fiber is cheap, and its
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 5, NO. 1, MARCH 2003
current price is about U.S. $0.2 per yard [17]. Nevertheless, its
bandwidth is about 25 000 GHz [17], and it can currently pro-
vide about one hundred OC-48 channels at 2.5 Gbps/channel
[18], [19]. Even if each channel is operated at the OC-1 rate
50 Mbps/channel (OC-1 is mature and economical), an optical
fiber can still provide a capacity of 100 50 Mbps 5 Gbps.
This is sufficient for the current application (e.g., see the design
examples in Section V-C).
I/O bandwidth: Given a broadcast delivery scheme, the pages
or minipages can be stored in such a way that they are read se-
quentially from the storage for broadcasting. In this manner, the
I/O bottleneck can be avoided. The I/O bandwidth required de-
pends on the number of video programs, but it does not depend
on the number of concurrent customers. Therefore, the proposed
system is particularly suitable for large scale applications with
many customers.
I/O speed and channel bit rate: We can match the I/O speed
of a disk with the bit rate of an optical channel, so that the
system can simply read from a disk for broadcasting over an
optical channel. For example, if we use a disk with I/O speed
50 Mbps [20], we can operate each optical channel at the OC-1
rate 50 Mbps. In this manner, the system requires an array of
small capacity disks.
MPEG Video: MPEG is a common video compression stan-
dard [21]. It produces three types of frames: I frames, P frames,
and B frames. A group of frames consists of an I frame and a cer-
tain combination of P frames and B frames, and each group is in-
dependent of the other groups. The proposed system can support
MPEG video as follows. Within the VOD warehouse, each mini-
page contains an integral number of groups, and its size is larger
than the average size of these groups by a specified percentage
margin in order to accommodate their variable sizes. Between
the VOD warehouse and the customer, a streaming protocol can
be used to deliver the video to the customer [22].
Video playback rate and duration: In the proposed system,
different video programs can occupy different number of optical
channels. Therefore, it can accommodate video programs with
different playback rate (e.g., 1.5 Mbps for MPEG-1 and 4 Mbps
for MPEG-2) and different duration (e.g., 90 min and 120 min).
B. Selection of Design Parameters
1) Cycle Duration : The determination of the cycle dura-
tion involves two conflicting factors, as follows.
• If is larger, a channel can broadcast more pages in a
cycle and hence an optical fiber can broadcast more video
programs. Therefore, a smaller number of optical fibers is
needed.
• If is larger, the mean access delay is longer. It is because
when a customer initiates a new VOD session, the associ-
ated proxy has to wait for an average of s before it
can retrieve the first page of the requested video program.
The service provider can specify an acceptable mean access
delay . Then the cycle duration can be chosen to be .
2) Number of Optical Fibers : The number of optical
fibers required depends on the number of video programs,
the durations of these programs, and the cycle duration. Each
optical channel can broadcast bits in a cycle. If the th
LEUNG AND CHAN: DESIGN OF AN INTERACTIVE VOD SYSTEM 139

video program has a duration of s, it has bits and hence TABLE II

it requires channels where SPECIFICATION FOR EXAMPLE 1

(1)

Each video program is broadcast in one optical fiber. When

, an optical fiber can already broad-
cast all the video programs and hence . Otherwise,
multiple optical fibers are needed. The problem of minimizing
is equivalent to the bin packing problem [23]–[25] and this
problem is NP-hard.
When the number of video programs is not large (say,
), the solution space is not very large and it is possible
to find the minimal . For example, we can formulate the
problem as an integer programming problem and then apply the
branch-and-bound technique [26] to find the optimal solutions.
When is large, we have to resort to a good heuristic algorithm.
Many heuristic algorithms have been proposed for bin packing,
and the most famous one is probably the first-fit algorithm
[23], [24]. This algorithm has time complexity , and it
works as follows. Examine the video programs one after the
other. For each video program, select the optical fiber that can
first accommodate it. If all the existing optical fibers cannot
accommodate this video program, introduce a new optical fiber
for it. There are many other good heuristic algorithms, and
a recent one can be found in [25].
3) Number of Proxies : If the system has more proxies, it
can serve more ongoing customers and hence it is less likely
that a request for a new VOD session is blocked. However, the
system is more costly. To make a tradeoff, the service provider
can specify an acceptable blocking probability and then de-
termine the minimal number of proxies required.
We assume that the arrivals of requests for new VOD ses-
sions follow a Poisson process with rate [5], [6], and we let
be the mean duration of a VOD session (it is different from
the mean duration of the video programs because the customers
may perform interactive operations). The system of proxies
can be modeled as an queue [27]. When all the
proxies are serving customers, any additional request will be
blocked and the blocking probability can be found to be
[27]:
(e.g., contain at least one group of nine frames for MPEG [21]).
To minimize the buffer size required by each proxy, we choose
the largest such that these constraints are fulfilled.
C. Design Examples
We simulate and test the proposed system using OPNET. In
this subsection, we present two design examples.
Example 1: We design a VOD system for a large scale appli-
cation, in which there is one customer requesting a new VOD
session in every second on average (i.e., request/s )
and the mean duration of a VOD session is 100 minutes (i.e.,
min). We adopt the specification in Table II. In addi-
tion, video is compressed by MPEG with nine frames per group,
and each minipage contains at least two groups of frames with
10% margin.
We determine the design parameters as follows.
• Given s, we choose the cycle duration to be
s
• Each video program requires
channels. There are 50 video
programs. Therefore, the system requires two optical
fibers.
• To fulfill the given requirement , the number of proxies
must satisfy

(2) The minimal satisfying the above inequality can be

found to be 6003.
• Since the tuning time cannot be larger than (see
To fulfill the given requirement , we determine the smallest Table I), we have or . Since
such that . Since is a decreasing function of , each minipage contains at least two groups of frames,
we can use the bisection method [28] to determine the minimal or . We choose .
. The buffer size required by each proxy is
4) Number of Minipages Per Page : In interleaved broad- Kbytes.
cast delivery, a page is divided into minipages. To reduce the Example 2: This example is the same as Example 1, except
buffer size required by each proxy, should be as large as pos- that the acceptable mean access delay is 5 s. We choose the
sible (see Table I). However, has to fulfill two constraints. cycle duration to be s. Then each video
First, the actual tuning time must be equal to or smaller than the program requires 18 optical channels. Therefore, the system re-
maximum permissible tuning time . Second, each mini- quires ten optical fibers, where each optical fiber accommodates
page may have to contain at least a certain number of frames five video programs. This design adopts a smaller cycle duration
140
than the previous design in Example 1. Consequently, it pro-
vides a better quality (i.e., shorter access delay and better inter-
active operations) at the expenses of using more optical fibers.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we adopted both the client–server paradigm and
the broadcast delivery paradigm to design a VOD system for
large scale applications with many customers. This system has
the following desirable features.
• The system can easily be scaled up to serve more concur-
rent customers and provide more video programs.
• The system can provide interactive operations which are
approximations of the ideal ones. The customer can con-
trol the pause duration, the fast forward rate and the fast
rewind rate.
• The system only involves point-to-point communication
between the VOD warehouse and each customer. This type
of communication can be supported by many existing net-
work infrastructures.
• The system does not involve any network control. This is
important when the network is not owned and managed by
the VOD service provider.
• The access delay is small.
• Each video stream only requires a small buffer size for
temporary storage.
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Yiu-Wing Leung (M’92–SM’96) received the B.Sc.
and Ph.D. degrees from the Chinese University of
Hong Kong in 1989 and 1992, respectively. His Ph.D.
advisor was Prof. T. S. Yum.
After graduation, he was with the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University until 1997. He then joined
the Hong Kong Baptist University and now he is an
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Science. He has a wide range of research interests
and he has been working on three main areas:
information networks, multimedia communications
and systems, and cybernetics and systems engineering. He has published
more than 50 journal papers in these areas, most of which appear in various
IEEE publications. He has supervised several Ph.D. students and postdoctoral
fellows, and some of them now teach at various universities in Singapore, the
United Kingdom, Canada, and Hong Kong.
Tony K. C. Chan received the M.Sc. degree in
information technology from the Department of
Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the
Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong
Baptist University. His professional interests include
information networks and multimedia systems.