Improving video-on-demand performance with prefetching

ABSTRACT: Over the past few years multimedia communications has become essential parts of people’s daily life. In this context, video streaming is attracting extensive attention and is becoming one of the most popular activities over the Internet. However, video streaming supports a large number of simultaneous users and consumes more network bandwidth as compared to other internet applications. So, implementations that can improve video streaming efficiency are of particular importance. On the other hand, the spectacular development in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies presents scalability and support for large number of users worldwide. In this work, we consider a prefetching mechanism in a P2P Video-on-Demand (VoD) system and study performance of using this prefetching method on our model. We compute the prefetching time for one video segment and then divide our idle time into several slices of prefetch activities. The prefetched segments are the segments which are not available on other peers in the network, therefore those must be prefetched from the server directly. With using this prefetching mechanism, the idle time of the system is reduced and consequently, the efficiency of the system will be improved. Keywords: Prefetching, VoD Systems, Peer-to-Peer Networks, Efficiency. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………