Video-on-demand (VoD) systems have traditionally been built on the client-server architecture, where a video server stores, retrieves, and transmits video data to video clients for playback. This paper investigates a radically different approach to building VoD systems, one where the server, and hence the primary bottleneck, is completely eliminated. This server-less architecture comprises homogeneous hosts, called nodes, which serve both as client and as mini-server. Video data are distributed over all nodes and these nodes cooperatively stream video data to one another for playback. However, unlike traditional video server that runs on high-end server hardware in a carefully controlled and protected data centre, a node in a server-less system is likely to be far more unreliable. Therefore it is essential that sufficient data and capacity redundancies are incorporated to maintain an acceptable service reliability. This paper presents and analyzes a fault tolerant mechanism based on i...
Jack Y. B. Lee, Raymond W. T. Leung