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Equipment allocation in video-on-demand network deployments

Video-on-Demand (VoD) services are very user-friendly, but also complex and resource demanding. Deployments involve careful design of many mechanisms where content attributes and usage models should be taken into account. We define, and propose a methodology to solve, the VoD Equipment Allocation Problem of determining the number and type of streaming servers with directly attached storage (VoD servers) to install at each potential location in a metropolitan area network topology such that deployment costs are minimized. We develop a cost model for VoD deployments based on streaming, storage and transport costs and train a parametric function that maps the amount of available storage to a worst-case hit ratio. We observe the impact of having to determine the amount of storage and streaming cojointly, and determine the minimum demand required to deploy replicas as well as the average hit ratio at each location. We observe that common video-on-demand server configurations lead to the installation of excessive storage, because a relatively high hit-ratio can be achieved with small amounts of storage so streaming requirements dominate.