Localized P2P VoD Delivery Scheme with Pre-fetching for Broadband Access Networks

Video on Demand (VoD) service has become an increasingly popular service in recent years as a result of the rapid deployment of Fiber-to-the-Home networks. Due to its enormous bandwidth and stringent quality of service requirements, deploying an efficient and scalable VoD service still remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a peer-to peer (P2P) VoD distribution scheme for PONs in which the P2P delivery is localized to within the same access network and in which a selected set of movies is pre-fetched into the customer premises equipment during off-peak hours. The proposed delivery scheme mitigates the load from the VoD server by exploiting the participation of the customer equipment in VoD distribution. In turn, this optimizes bandwidth consumption of the VoD service in both core and metro networks as the P2P video traffic is localized within the access network. We formulate movie pre-fetching as an optimization problem which determines the number of copies of each movie to be pre-fetched, and we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve it. Using simulations we show that our proposed replication algorithm performs much better than existing popularity based replication algorithm that has been proposed for similar purposes. Moreover, we show that our proposed delivery scheme effectively reduced the server load in busy hours while having high but random server load reduction in off-peak hours of service.