Abstract
In Video on Demand (VoD) services, the demand for content items greatly changes daily over the course of the day. Because service providers are required to maintain a stable service during peak hours, they need to design system resources on the basis of peak demand time, so reducing the server load at peak times is important. To reduce the peak load of a content server, we propose to multicast popular content items to all users independently of actual requests as well as providing on-demand unicast delivery. With this solution, however, the hit ratio of pre-distributed content items is small, and large-capacity storage is required at each set-top box (STB). We can expect to cope with this problem by limiting the number of pre-distributed content items or clustering users based on their viewing histories. We evaluated the effect of these techniques by using actual VoD access log data. We also evaluated the total cost of the multicast pre-distribution VoD system with the proposed two techniques.
