An incentive charging scheme for video-on-demand
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An incentive charging scheme for video-on-demand Y-W Leung1* and EWM Wong2 1
Hong Kong Baptist University, and 2City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Video-on-demand (VOD) systems can provide either an individual service or batch service. For individual service, a user can receive video immediately after making a request and he=she can perform interactive operations (such as pause, jump, fast forward and rewind), and the system uses one video stream to serve one user. For batch service, a user has to wait after making a request and cannot perform interactive operations, but the system can use one video stream to serve a batch of users. Therefore, individual service has a better quality while batch service requires less resources to serve each user. In this paper, we consider a VOD system providing both services and propose an incentive charging scheme to optimize the coexistence of both services. This scheme imposes a lower service charge on batch service in order to attract users to choose this service. Consequently, the service provider can get more revenue by serving more concurrent users via batch service and users can choose their preferred services. We analyze the incentive charging scheme and maximize the mean revenue subject to a given availability speci®cation. The numerical results show that the incentive charging scheme is particularly effective in peak hours when the demand for the VOD service is large. Keywords: information systems; telecommunications; stochastic optimization
Introduction A video-on-demand (VOD) system provides an electronic video rental service to geographically distributed users.1,2 Using this service, users can select and watch video programmes at a convenient time and place, and they may interact with the programmes using interactive operations such as pause, jump, fast forward and rewind. Figure 1 shows a typical VOD system. A server system stores a collection of video programmes, and it delivers video to the users through an information network upon their requests. To design a VOD system, two problems must be addressed: (1) how to deliver video from the server system to the users, and (2) how to design a server system. We ®rst consider the problem of delivering video. The server system can deliver video through an existing information network, and then through the existing cables between the local exchanges and the users using digital subscriber line methods.3,4 For example, the following subscriber line methods are used in the ®rst commercial VOD system (called iTV system) in the world:5±7 When there is an optical ®bre between a local exchange and a building, video is delivered from the local exchange to the building through the optical ®bre and then it is delivered to the user through the telephone twisted pairs within the building using Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL).3 VDSL is relatively cheap and *Correspondence: Y-W Leung, Department of Computer Scien
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