Predicting the service performance of Internet applications is important in service selection, especially for video services. In order to design a predictor for forecasting video service performance in third-party application, two famous service providers in China, Iqiyi and Letv, are monitored and analyzed. The study highlights that the measured performance in the observation period is time-series data, and it has strong autocorrelation, which means it is predictable. In order to combine the temporal information and map the measured data to a proper feature space, the authors propose a predictor based on a Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (CRBM), which can capture the potential temporal relationship of the historical information. Meanwhile, the measured data of different sources are combined to enhance the training process, which can enlarge the training size and avoid the over-fit problem. Experiments show that combining the measured results from different resolutions for a video can raise prediction performance, and the CRBM algorithm shows better prediction ability and more stable performance than the baseline algorithms.

Video services such as video-on-demand are expected to be a motivation for deploying multimedia services in residential areas. These services should increase customer demand for video channels as customer demands become more sophisticated and diverse in the future. Therefore, it is important to determine how network configurations (i.e. network transition scenarios) should evolve in response to changes in access network demand. This paper proposes economical deployment of access networks based on transition scenarios. We conclude that transition scenarios offer more economical deployment than single-network configurations. Two transition scenarios, from passive double-star to fiber single-star, and from hybrid fiber-coax to fiber single-star, are evaluated as examples. These transition scenarios are economical even when customer demand changes. The transition starting time affects the present worth of annual charges (PWAC) of access networks more than the transition period does.