Abstract

Efficient video-on-demand (VoD) is a highly desired service for media and telecom providers. VoD allows subscribers to view any item in a large media catalog nearly-instantaneously. However, systems that provide this service currently require large amounts of centralized resources and significant bandwidth to accommodate their subscribers. Hardware requirements become more substantial as the service providers increase the catalog size or number of subscribers. In this talk, we describe how cable companies can leverage deployed hardware in a peer-to-peer architecture to provide an efficient alternative. We propose a distributed VoD system, and use real measurements from a deployed VoD system to evaluate different design decisions. Our results show that with minor changes, currently deployed cable infrastructures can support a video-on-demand system that scales to a large number of users and catalog size with low centralized resources.

Biography

Ben Y. Zhao is a faculty member at the Computer Science department, U.C. Santa Barbara. Before UCSB, he completed his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley, and his B.S. degree from Yale University. His primary research interests include security and privacy, vehicular networks, large-scale networking, and distributed systems. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the MIT Tech Review TR-35 Award.