An incentive charging scheme for video-on-demand

Video-on-demand (VOD) systems can provide either an individual service or batch service. For individual service, a user can receive video immediately after making a request and he/she can perform interactive operations (such as pause, jump, fast forward and rewind), and the system uses one video stream to serve one user. For hatch service, a user has to wait af^er making a request and cannot perform interactive operations, hut the system can use one video stream to serve a hatch of users. Therefore, individual service has a hetter quality while hatch service requires less resources to serve each user. In this paper, we consider a VOD system providing hoth services and propose an incentive charging scheme to optimize the coexistence of hoth services. This scheme imposes a lower service charge on hatch service in order to attract users to choose this service. Consequently, the service provider can get more revenue hy serving more concurrent users via hatch service and users can choose their preferred services. We analyze the incentive charging scheme and maximize the mean revenue suhject to a given availahility specification. The numerical results show that the incentive charging scheme is particularly effective in peak hours when the demand for the VOD service is large.