Rapid developments in multimedia technology over the past decade has caused video-on-demand services to emerge not only as a new paradigm in entertainment but also as a commercially lucrative proposition. But a full-fledged development of such a serv...
Rapid developments in multimedia technology over the past decade has caused video-on-demand services to emerge not only as a new paradigm in entertainment but also as a commercially lucrative proposition. But a full-fledged development of such a service has to first deal with several critical issues related to the delivery of video data over MANs or WANs. Because of the large volume of data involved in the process and stringent continuity and real-time constraints, these issues pose challenges that are different from the standard file transfer operations in the network. The necessity of efficient usage of scarce fesources like network bandwidth and server capacith (in terms of I/O bandwidth) demands novel and east-to-use schemes for delivering continuous video streams. This paper presents an overview of VoD session management issues and scheduling policies for video delivery.