Zero-delay broadcasting protocols for video-on-demand

Abstract

Broadcasting protocols for video-on-demand continuously retransmit videos that are watched simultaneously by many viewers. Nearly all broadcasting protocols assume that the client set-top box has enough storage to store between 48 and 60 minutes of video. We propose to use this storage to anticipate the customer requests and to preload, say, the first 3 minutes of the top 16 to 20 videos. This would provide instantaneous access to these videos and also eliminate the extra bandwidth required to handle compressed video signal.We present two broadcasting protocols using partial preloading to eliminate this extra bandwidth. The first of these protocols, Polyharmonic Broadcasting with Partial Preloading (PHB-PP), partitions each video into between 20 and 160 segments of equal duration and allocates a separate data stream to each individual segment. Our second protocol, the Mayan Temple Broadcasting protocol, uses fewer data streams but requires more overall bandwidth.

Design and analysis of a demand adaptive and locality aware streaming media server cluster

“…In the context of scalable network delivery, several recent efforts have investigated techniques such as periodic broadcast and patching to scale the network capacity of the server to a large number of users using multicast [4,41,29,19,10]. These techniques complement our work, since all of them can be employed by DALA as well.…”

Optimal Delay for Media-on-Demand with Pre-loading and Pre-buffering

“…The papers [18,16] consider pre-loading, but only for the case of zero delay. The paper [18] does not allow pre-buffering before the clients start watching the movie whereas the paper [16] improve the results by allowing this feature.…”

“…The paper [18] does not allow pre-buffering before the clients start watching the movie whereas the paper [16] improve the results by allowing this feature. In another work on pre-loading [10], it is assumed that each client pre-loads segments of a different set of movies, according to the client's choice.…”

A stream tapping protocol with partial preloading

“…Partial preloading [15] loads in the customer STB the first few minutes of the top 10 to 20 videos in order to provide zero-delay access to these videos and reduce the server bandwidth of the broadcasting protocol distributing the remainder of the video.…”