Simulation of a Video-on-Demand System
Song B Toh · 1995
This paper presents a simulation study of a video-on-demand system. The focus of the study is the effectiveness of different caching strategies on a video-on-demand system with two levels of cache, RAM and disks, in front of a tape library. Using an event-driven simulator, I show that the service capacity of the system benefited only marginally from caching if no other information was available. I find that ondemand caching was only useful if movies to be shown clustered around a few popular titles (in other words, there was temporal locality). 1 Introduction A video-on-demand system is a multimedia application with immense storage requirements. Even with the advances in storage architecture, the stringent real-time demand of a video-on-demand (VoD) system can still stretch the technology to its limit. In such a system, multiple streams of audio and video data have to be delivered uninterrupted to the clients. When the system fails to meet the requirement of ontime error-free delivery,...