Multimedia content delivery services in the cloud with partial sleep and abandonment

The recent past has witnessed tremendous advances in the fields of storage computing and communication technology, enabling the realization of multimedia service networks. These networks lead to rapid consumption of network bandwidth due to the voluminous transfer of real-time data. An example of a multimedia service network is the Video-On-Demand service which enables the streaming of video on demand. In this paper, we consider the impatient behavior of viewers while waiting for the video and allow a fixed number of servers to take sleep when idle. We observe that idle servers consume a significant amount of energy. Dynamically sending servers into hibernation or sleep shall increase energy efficiency, leading to lower costs incurred by content providers. We enable a fixed number of servers to take a partial synchronous sleep when idle. We model it by a GI/M/c/N queue with abandonment and partial synchronous sleep mode. We propose a cost function for the model and examine the dependence upon the various system parameters. The number of servers that should be commissioned such that the system meets prescribed standards for performance, while minimizing associated cost is determined. Also, the performance measures of the model are compared on a variety of fronts, including cost and energy expended.