Adaptive Piggybacking Schemes for Video-on-Demand Systems

A critical issue in the performance of a video-on-demand system is the I/O bandwidth required in order to satisfy client requests. A number of techniques have been proposed in order to reduce these bandwidth requirements. In this paper we concentrate on one such technique, known as adaptive piggybacking. We develop and analyze piggyback merging policies which are optimal over large classes of reasonable methods. We also show how to modify these policies in order to incorporate advanced features such as pause-resume, fast-forward and rewind.