The Principal Investigator (PI) will study efficient schemes that provide interactive video-on-demand (VOD) services in multicast networks. Interactive VOD services allow a subscriber to select the content of his/her choice at any time, and are likely to become one of the most successful services in the emerging broadband integrated services digital networks. The great challenge in the design of a VOD system is to address the bottleneck on the server network-I/O bandwidth for delivering videos to a large number of users. At the core of this design issue is the problem of efficient scheduling of server and network resources so as to satisfy various requests from a diverse set of clients. This research is a systematic study of efficient schemes for scheduling server and network resources. In addition, the PI will explore avenues that facilitate interactive operations without making excessive demands on server and network resources. The PI will also build a testbed incorporating the proposed schemes on the very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) and the Internet Multicast Backbone (Mbone). The testbed will allow the researcher to address implementation issues and to experiment with the proposed schemes and additional issues arising from these experiments.
Education Focus: The PI is committed to a career in undergraduate computer science education. Since coming to Smith College --a four-year liberal arts college for women, the PI has incorporated multimedia and networking concepts into the computer science curriculum at all levels. Multimedia networking is an essential and important aspect of the ``information revolution''. The proposed research provides an ideal framework for undergraduate women's participation. The research project described requires extensive simulations to bolster the analyses and algorithm designs. The implementation of and experimentation with the testbed described will provide a long-term undergraduate research program. Through the project described in this proposal, the PI plans to continue supervising undergraduate women to do research in multimedia networking. She also plans to attract more undergraduate women to major in computer science and mentor women in this field through being a role model, one-to-one interaction, and student career advising. These are all activities strongly supported by Smith in the form of financial and administrative resources, outreach programs.
