Smoothing and Prefetching Video from Distributed Servers

Video prefetching has been proposed recently for the transmission of variable-bit-rate(VBR) video over a packetswitched network. The objective of these protocols is to prefetch future frames to be stored at the customer's settop box (STB) in periods of low link utilization. Experimental results have shown that video prefetching is very effective and it achieves much higher network utilization (i.e. larger number of simultaneous connections) than the traditional video smoothing schemes. Video prefetching, however, can only be efficiently implemented when there is one centralized server that serves the different customers over a common link. In a distributed environment there is a large degradation in its performance. In this paper we introduce a new scheme that utilizes smoothing along with prefetching, to overcome the problem of distributed prefetching. We will show that our scheme performs almost as well as the centralized prefetching protocol even though it is implemented in a ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICNP
• Authors: Spiridon Bakiras, Victor O. K. Li
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Distributed Environment, ICNP 1999, Video Prefetching, Video Smoothing Schemes