On transmission scheduling in a server-less video-on-demand system

Recently, a server-less video-on-demand architecture has been proposed which can completely eliminate costly dedicated video servers and yet is highly scalable and reliable. Due to the potentially large number of user hosts streaming video data to a receiver for playback, the aggregate network traffic can become very bursty, leading to significant packet loss at the access routers (e.g. 95.7%). This study tackles this problem by investigating two new transmission schedulers to reduce the traffic burstiness. Detailed simulations based on Internet-like network topologies show that the proposed Staggered Scheduling algorithm can reduce packet loss to negligible levels if nodes can be clock synchronized. Otherwise, a Randomized Scheduling algorithm is proposed to achieve consistent performance that is independent of network delay variations, and does not require any form of node synchronization.