Improving Efficiency and Enhancing Utilizability of Media-on-Demand Systems

Media-on-demand services grant the consumer the possibility to select a media stream from the offer of the provider and to request it at arbitrary time. Certainly, this surplus service creates additional requirements to the sender and receiver systems and the network, especially when a large number of receiver systems are simultaneously active.The aim of this thesis is to improve the efficiency of media-on-demand transmissions and to enhance the utilizability of media-on-demand systems. Therefore, many existing systems have been analyzed and an improved system has been developed. This system incorporates nearly any of the advantages and extensions of the other systems while operating at an efficiency near to the theoretical optimum and providing a high flexibility and robustness at the same time. Additionally, an embedding in a real-time transport protocol has been proposed and a comparison of the cost-effectiveness opposed to traditional media-on-demand systems has been provided.