@conference {2847,
	title = {Competitive Video on Demand Schedulers for Popular Movies},
	booktitle = {Workshop on Algorithmic Aspects of Communications (ICALP satellite workshop),  Bologna, Italy},
	year = {1997},
	month = {11 - 12 July},
	abstract = {<p>In this paper we investigate the online video on demand problem, namely having to accept or reject a request for a movie without knowing the future requests. We present online movie-scheduling schemes that implement the principles of refusal by choice and delayed notication. A novel way to schedule movies that exploits the knowledge of the distribution of the preference of requests for movies, is shown to have a competitive ratio that outperforms all the previously known schemes in practical situations. In fact, our scheduler has a competitive ratio bounded above by a constant, independent of the number of the users, channels, or movies, in the case that a large fraction of the requests tends to concentrate in a small number of movies. We extend our approach by presenting an \adaptive" randomized scheduler which initially is not aware of the movie popularities but it adapts to it, and achieves a similar asymptotic competitive ratio.</p>
},
	author = {Christos Bouras and Vaggelis Kapoulas and Paul Spirakis and G Pantziou}
}
