Design of an interactive video-on-demand system

We design an interactive video-on-demand (VOD) system using both the client-server paradigm and the broadcast delivery paradigm. Between the VOD warehouse and the customers, we adopt a client-server paradigm to provide an interactive service. Within the VOD warehouse, we adopt a broadcast delivery paradigm to support many concurrent customers. In particular, we exploit the enormous bandwidth of optical fibers for broadcast delivery, so that the system can provide many video program and maintain a small access delay. In addition, we design and adopt an interleaved broadcast delivery scheme, so that every video stream only requires a small buffer size for temporary storage. A simple proxy is allocated to each ongoing customer, and it retrieves video from the optical channels and delivers the video to the customer through an information network. The proposed VOD system is suitable for large scale applications with many customers, and it has several desirable features: 1) it can be scaled up to serve more concurrent customers and provide more video programs, 2) it provides interactive operations, 3) it only requires point-to-point communication between the VOD warehouse and the customer and it does not involve any network control, 4) it has a small access delay, and 5) it requires a small buffer size for each video stream.