Providing VCR in a Distributed Client Collaborative Multicast Video Delivery Scheme

Abstract

In order to design a high scalable video delivery technology for VoD systems, two representative solutions have been developed: multicast and P2P. Each of them has limitations when it has to implement VCR interactions to offer true-VoD services. With multicast delivery schemes, part of system resources has to be exclusively allocated in order to implement VCR operations, therefore the initial VoD system performance is considerably reduced. The P2P technology is able to decentralize the video delivery process among all the clients. However, P2P solutions are for video streaming systems in Internet and do not implement VCR interactivity. Therefore, P2P solutions are not suitable for true-VoD systems. In this paper, we propose the design of VCR mechanisms for a P2P multicast delivery scheme. The new mechanisms coordinate all the clients to implement the VCR operations using multicast communications. We compared our design with previous schemes and the results show that our approach is able to reduce the resource requirements by up to 16%.

This work was supported by the MCyT-Spain under contract TIC 2004-03388.