Tabbycat: an Inexpensive Scalable Server for Video-on-Demand

Appeared in Proceedings of the IEEE 2003 International Conference on Communications.

Abstract

Tabbycat is a video server prototype demonstrating the benefits of a proactive approach for distributing popular videos on demand to a large customer base. Rather than reacting to individual customer requests, Tabbycat broadcasts the contents of the most popular videos according to a fixed schedule. As a result, the number of customers watching a given video does not affect the cost of distributing it. We found that one workstation with a single ATA disk drive and a Fast Ethernet interface could distribute three two-hour videos while achieving a maximum customer waiting time of less than four minutes. 

Publication date:
May 2003

Authors:
Karthik Thirumalai
Jehan-François Pâris
Darrell D. E. Long

Projects:
Scalable File System Indexing

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{ICC-Thirumalai-2003,
  author       = {Karthik  Thirumalai and Jehan-François Pâris and Darrell D. E. Long},
  title        = {Tabbycat: an Inexpensive Scalable Server for Video-on-Demand},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the IEEE 2003 International Conference on Communications},
  month        = may,
  year         = {2003},
}