Most existing distribution protocols for video-on-demand are tailored for a specific range of request arrival rates and do not perform well beyond that range. We present a universal distribution protocol based on Juhn and Tseng’s fast broadcasting protocol. Our protocol performs as well as the best reactive protocol at low to moderate request arrival rates and reverts to the fast broadcasting protocol at high arrival rates.

The key performance bottleneck for a video-on-demand (VOD) server is bandwidth, which controls the number of clients the server can simultaneously support. Previous work has shown that a strategy called stream tapping can make efficient use of bandwidth when clients are not allowed to interact (through VCR-like controls) with the video they are viewing. Here we present an interactive version of stream tapping and analyze its performance through the use of discrete event simulation. In particular, we show that stream tapping can use as little as 10% of the bandwidth required by dedicating a unique stream of data to each client request.