In this work we investigate a promising scheduling algorithm referred to as the Deadline Credit (DC) algorithm, which exploits
the available bandwidth and buffer space in communication networks to serve a diverse class of prerecorded video applications.
We provide simulation results when the DC algorithm is applied to a hierarchical architecture distributed VoD network, which
fits the existing tree topology used in today’s cable TV systems. The issues investigated via the simulations are: the system
utilization, the influence of the buffer space on the delivered QoS, and the fairness of the scheduling mechanism. We examine
cases with homogenous and diverse video streams. We also contribute a modification to the DC algorithm so that in cases when
the video applications have different displaying periods, the video streams obtain a fair share of the network’s resources.
Finally, we validate our results by simulating actual videos encoded in MPEG-4 and H.263 formats.