Return based scheduling to support video-on-demand applications

摘要

A Video-On-Demand (VOD) scheduler maintains a queue of pending performance for at least one movie and determines a maximum wait tolerance time for a longest waiting one of the pending performance requests. When stream capacities become available, rather than scheduling the movie immediately the scheduler delays performance of the video until just prior to expiration of the maximum wait tolerance time of the longest waiting one of the pending performance requests. In the interim, additional streams can join queue. When the performance occurs all performance requests on the queue are served from the a single stream provided from the assigned stream capacity. $$