On the design of efficient video-on-demand broadcast schedules

In order to address the scalability problems of video-on-demand systems, several periodic broadcast schemes have been proposed that partition a video into segments and repetitively broadcast each segment on a separate channel. A new scheme is presented for the bandwidth-efficient periodic broadcast of video. The proposed scheme determines the segment sizes and their corresponding channel bandwidths as a result of a non-linear optimization problem which minimizes the total required bandwidth for the broadcast. The new scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of bandwidth demands while it also decouples the playout latency from the number of available channels. Further analysis reveals that its asymptotic bandwidth requirements exactly match the asymptotic bandwidth requirements reported for poly-harmonic broadcasting.