On-demand media streaming to hybrid wired/wireless networks over quasi-geostationary satellite systems
In order to realize the dream of global personal communications, the integration of terrestrial and satellite communications networks becomes mandatory. In such environments, multimedia applications, such as video-on-demand services, will become more popular. This paper proposes an architecture based on a combination of Quasi-GeoStationary Orbit satellite systems and terrestrial networks for building a large-scale and efficient VoD system. A hybrid network made of fixed and mobile nodes is considered. The key idea of the architecture is to service fixed nodes according to the neighbors-buffering policy, a recently proposed scheme for VoD delivery, while mobile nodes are served directly from the local server. To allow users to receive their VoD applications with higher degree of mobility, issues related to mobility management are discussed and a simple scheme is proposed to guarantee a smooth streaming of video data. The importance of the proposed architecture is verified by numerical results. In case of requests coming from fixed nodes within the reach of terrestrial networks, analytical results elucidate the good performance of the architecture in terms of both increasing the system capacity and reducing the disk-bandwidth requirements. Conducted simulations indicate how efficient the proposed system is in smoothening handoffs.