A hybrid delivery strategy for a video-on-demand system with customer reneging behavior

A new delivery strategy is proposed for a video-on-demand system to allocate transmission resources according to the popularity of videos. A video is delivered to customers through one of three channels, namely broadcast, multicast and unicast, depending on whether the video is very hot, hot or cold, respectively. An algorithm is developed to select the appropriate delivery channel for the videos so that not only the overall bandwidth of the system is minimized but also a preset quality of service is provided for each customer. An analytical model is also developed to evaluate the bandwidth requirement of the whole system with VCR functionality. The result shows that a significant bandwidth reduction can be achieved when using our proposed delivery strategy.