Video-on-demand server selection and placement

Abstract

Large-scale Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems with high storage and high bandwidth requirements need a substantial amount of resources to store, distribute and transport all of the content and deliver it to the clients. We define an extension to the VoD equipment allocation problem as determining the number and model of VoD servers to install at each potential replica location to minimize deployment costs for a given set of distributed demand and available VoD server models. We propose three novel heuristics that generate near-optimal solutions and show that the number of replica sites for networks where the load is unevenly distributed is low (35-45% of potential locations), but that the hit ratios at deployed replicas are high (> 85%). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.