Evaluation of Video Server Capacity with Regard to Quality of the Service in Interactive News-On-Demand Systems

摘要

A key issue in any system for distribution of continuous media-on-demand is the capacity of the system with regard to quality of the service specifications, that is, the number of simultaneous streams the system can provide until degradation of the quality of reproduction and interactivity perceived by the users. This work presents the evaluation of interactive video-on-demand systems, with special attention to limitations caused by the video server. The evaluation is based on a set of metrics designed to determine the number of streams a video server can support under specific requirements of the quality of the service as perceived by the users. To validate the utility of these metrics, a prototype of a news-on-demand service has been built and the load for this kind of systems has been characterised. In addition, a load generator which emulates the concurrent access of several users to the system has been built. The evaluation establishes the relationship between the video server limitations and the quality of the service perceived by the users.