GloVE: A Distributed Environment for Low Cost Scalable VoD

In this paper, we present the Global Video Environment (GloVE), which is a novel scalable VoD system based on the stream reusage technique called Cooperative Video Cache (CVC), where the clients cooperate to create a distributed video repository used as the prior source of content. In GloVE, differently from conventional systems, the server’s bandwidth does not limit the number of simultaneous active clients because subsequent requests to the same video are satisfied by the CVC, following a peer-to-peer approach, making possible the usage of low cost PCs as the system’s video server. Our system extends the original CVC proposal by adding support for video servers without multicast capability, storing any video format. We analyze preliminary performance results of GloVE using a Fast Ethernet based PC server and small buffers at the clients demonstrating that only one channel of the server need to be used to deliver a highly popular video to N clients, instead of the N channels required in the convetional servers.