A New Class of Scheduling Policies for Providing Time of Service Guarantees in Video-on-Demand Servers

Recent advances in storage and communication technologies have spurred a strong interest in Video-on-Demand (VOD) services. Providing the customers of VOD servers with time of service guarantees offers two major advantages. First, it makes VOD services more attractive by improving customer-perceived quality of service (QoS). Second, it improves throughput through the enhanced resource sharing attained by motivating the customers to wait. In this paper, we propose a new class of scheduling policies, called Next Schedule Time First (NSTF), which provides customers with schedule times and performsscheduling based on these schedule times. NSTF guarantees that customers will be serviced no later than scheduled and ensures that the schedule times are very accurate estimates of the actual times of service. We present alternative implementations of NSTF and show through simulation that NSTF works as expected and delivers outstanding performance benefits.