  Most P2P VoD schemes focused on service architectures and overlays
optimization without considering segments rarity and the performance of
prefetching strategies. As a result, they cannot better support VCRoriented
service in heterogeneous environment having clients using free VCR controls.
Despite the remarkable popularity in VoD systems, there exist no prior work
that studies the performance gap between different prefetching strategies. In
this paper, we analyze and understand the performance of different prefetching
strategies. Our analytical characterization brings us not only a better
understanding of several fundamental tradeoffs in prefetching strategies, but
also important insights on the design of P2P VoD system. On the basis of this
analysis, we finally proposed a cooperative prefetching strategy called
"cooching". In this strategy, the requested segments in VCR interactivities are
prefetched into session beforehand using the information collected through
gossips. We evaluate our strategy through extensive simulations. The results
indicate that the proposed strategy outperforms the existing prefetching
mechanisms.
