Enhanced unified architecture for video-on-demand services

In the unified video-on-demand (UVoD) architecture, the channels are classified as multicast and unicast channels. The multicast channels provide the services periodically and are independent of the number of user requests. The unicast channels provide the services to the individual user requests. The unicast channels are pretty costly and should be used efficiently. In the UVoD architecture, if the user requests are served without any delay, the number of unicast channels required is equal to the number of multicast channels. Further, in that architecture, the optimal number of unicast channels is reported to be independent of the request arrival rate, which is highly unlikely. In this paper, we propose a better UVoD architecture which is named as enhanced UVoD architecture, and it is also established that the number of unicast channels is not independent of the arrival rate, but depends on the number of videos, video length, number of multicast channels, and the request arrival rate. In this architecture, the user requests are served as soon as they are received at the video server(1).