We consider the problem of designing an ondemand video delivery system having a large number of video entities stored for distribution to a large number of customers.A logically layered information distribution network is assumed to serve the requests made by the customers.We Propose a stochastic model for video entities in the distribution system and pose a spatiotemporal allocation problem to minimize a general cost function that includes storage,transport and processing costs.Though such problems are generally known to be hard in terms of finding an implementable solution,we exploit the specific characteristics of our problem to provide an efficient polynomial time solution.We also show a simple recursive estimation procedure to track the time-varying demand probabilities assigned to the video entities in the system.Various approaches to a practical design are discussed.
展开▼
