Analysis of prefetching schemes for TV-on-Demand service

TV-on-Demand service has become one of the most popular Internet applications that continuously attracts higher user interests. With rapidly increasing user demand, the existing network conditions may not be able to ensure low start-up delay of video playback. Prefetching has been broadly investigated to cope with the start-up latency problem which is also known as user perceived latency. In this paper, we analyse request patterns for TV programs from a popular Swedish TV service provider over 11 weeks. According to the analysis, we propose a prefetching scheme at the user end to preload videos before user requests. Our prefetching scheme significantly improves the cache hit ratio compared to terminal caching and we note that there is a potential to further improve prefetching performance by customizing prefetching schemes for different video categories. We further present a cost model to determine the optimal number of videos to prefetch. Finally, we discuss available time for prefetching and suggest that when to make prefetching decisions depends on the user demand patterns of different video categories.