Patent ID: 8555323

Claim:
A method for replicating media contents in a P2P VoD system comprising a plurality of peers, comprising: determining that a candidate media unit shall be replicated into a local storage of one of the peers; checking whether said local storage has enough space to store the candidate media unit; if not, selecting one media unit previously stored in said local storage to be replaced; and replacing the selected media unit by the candidate media unit; wherein the selecting further comprises: selecting a media unit with a highest priority to be replaced from said one of the peers; and wherein the media unit r with the highest priority is determined by r=arg max kεQi η k (ASR k −PBR k ), where arg means the one in Q i that has the maximum value of η k (ASR k −PBR k ); and ASR k =Σ iεSk U i /λ i , where S k is a set of peers from the plurality of peers, each of which has a replication for media unit k in its local storage, U i is an upload capacity for a peer i in S k , and λ i is a Poison approximation for a number of peers who requests the media unit k from the peer i, and PBR k means a required playback rate for the media unit k, and η k represents a request rate/popularity for the media unit k.