Optimal object allocation for multimedia broadcast

With the arrival of terrestrial digital TV, a distribution network able to deliver up to 19 Mbits/s in each of the physical transmission channels will become available. Using the adopted data broadcast protocols, simultaneous transmission of multimedia documents to large population segments can be achieved. While these protocols describe methods for recognizing files in data streams, no method is known yet on how to distribute large collections of files in one or more data streams. This paper addresses this problem. The method proposed in the paper allocates objects in multiple streams according to their sizes and access probabilities, in such a way that average access latency is minimized. We show that the minimization problem can be described as a particular form of the NP hard quadratic allocation model for which an algorithmic solution for finding local minima exists.