Competitive Video on Demand Schedulers for Popular Movies

TitleCompetitive Video on Demand Schedulers for Popular Movies
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication1997
AuthorsBouras, C, Kapoulas, V, Spirakis, P, Pantziou, G
Conference NameWorkshop on Algorithmic Aspects of Communications (ICALP satellite workshop), Bologna, Italy
Date Published11 - 12 July
Abstract

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 notication. 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.

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