The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	A distributed network architecture for video-on-demand
Author:	Dai, Ge
View Online:	njit-etd1994-018 (xi, 73 pages ~ 3.4 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Electrical Engineering
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Palis, Michael Abueg (Committee chair) Robbi, Anthony D. (Committee member) Sohn, Kenneth (Committee member)
Date:	1994-10
Keywords:	Video Telephone Data Transmission Systems Computer Network Architectures
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	The objective of this thesis is to design a distributed network architecture that provides video - on - demand services to public subscribers. This architecture is proposed as an alternative to a centralized video service system. The latter system is currently being developed by Oracle Corporation and NCube Corporation. A simulator is developed to compare the performance of both the distributed and centralized video server architectures. Moreover, an estimate of the cost of both systems is derived using current price data. It is shown that the distributed video server architecture offers a better cost / performance trade-off than the centralized system. In addition, the distributed system can be scaled up in an incremental fashion to increase the system capacity and throughput. Finally, the distributed system is a more robust system: in the presence of component failure, it can be configured to isolate or bypass failed components. Thus, it allows for graceful performance degradation, which is difficult to achieve in a centralized system.