Stochastic modelling of peer-assisted VoD streaming in managed networks

Video on Demand is the leading service in Internet Protocol Television environments both in popularity and in quantity of generated traffic. Peer-assisted streaming in combination with an optimal distribution of the video contents on the peers has emerged as one of the most accepted solutions by the operators, especially in the privately managed networks, which helps to alleviate the streaming servers. However, an important question in these environments is how the system parameters and the various distributions of the video contents on the peers would impact the overall system performance. In order to give answers to these questions, we propose a precise and flexible stochastic model that takes into consideration parameters like uplink and storage capacity of the peers, number of peers, size of the video content library, size of contents and content distribution scheme to estimate the benefits of the peer-assisted streaming. We use this model as a tool that helps to find the optimal values of these parameters for best performance, as well as the limits of the system for a given configuration.