Video-on-Demand Network Design and Maintenance Using Fuzzy Optimization

Abstract

Abstract-Video-on-demand (VoD) is the entertainment source that, in the future, will likely overtake regular television in many aspects. Although many companies have deployed working VoD services, some aspects of the VoD should still undergo further improvement in order for it to reach to the foreseen potentials. An important aspect of a VoD system is the underlying network in which it operates. According to the huge number of customers in this network, it should be carefully designed to fulfill certain performance criteria. This process should be capable of finding optimal locations for the nodes of the network as well as determining the content that should be cached in each one. While this problem is categorized in the general group of network optimization problems, its specific characteristics demand a new solution to be sought for it. In this paper, which is inspired by the successful use of fuzzy optimization in similar problems in other fields, a fuzzy objective function that is heuristically shown to minimize the communication cost in a VoD network is derived while also controlling the storage cost. Then, an iterative algorithm is proposed to find a locally optimal solution to the proposed objective function. Capitalizing on the unrepeatable tendency of the proposed algorithm, a heuristic method for picking a good solution from a bundle of solutions produced by the proposed algorithm is also suggested. This paper includes a formal statement of the problem and its mathematical analysis. In addition, different scenarios in which the proposed algorithm can be utilized are discussed.Index Terms-Fuzzy optimization, network design, video-ondemand (VoD).

Topology-based Multicast Scheduling for On-Demand Multimedia Service Provisioning

“…To formulate the problem, delivery time (quality requirement) can be considered either as a constraint that cannot be violated, or it can be incorporated in the objective function by considering a penalty for late delivered contents. Since the ISP expects to receive new requests in the future, if the maximum delivery time is not violated, it can be profitable for the ISP to postpone transmitting the content to some receivers (who cannot be clustered into cost efficient multicast groups in the current transmission period) to the next period in hope for receiving more requests and sharing the cost with a larger group [3,9].…”

“…Many researchers have worked on VoD network design in such a way that is capable of providing the expected service to the potential customers. In [3], the authors formulated VoD design problem as locating a given number of nodes in a network to serve a given population.…”