The interactive video (IV) market has been expected to capture a significant share of the huge potential revenues to be generated by the business and residential markets. The level of revenues generated depends on the completion rate of calls the service provider can support, no matter what the IV system or network condition. Thus, a cost-effective, scalable fault-tolerant IV system is needed to maximize the video call completion rate at an affordable cost. This article describes design methodologies for a scalable, fault-tolerant IV system and an IV system design and analysis research prototype called IVSDNA (IV System Designer and Analyzer). The IVSDNA prototype is designed to help network planners and engineers to evaluate quantitative trade-offs (in terms of network communications costs, video storage costs, and degree of system fault tolerance) between two major IV system architectures (centralized and distributed) with a variety of video distribution methods, replication strategies, and fault-tolerant access protocols.
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