Data broadcasting and seamless channel transition for highly demanded videos

One way to broadcast a popular video is to use a number of dedicated channels, each responsible for broadcasting some portion of the video periodically in a predefined way. The stress on the channels can be alleviated, and new viewers do not have to wait long to start their playback. Many approaches falling in this category have been proposed. One such scheme that interests us is the fast broadcasting (FB) scheme, which can broadcast a video using k channels by incurring at most O(D/2/sup k/) waiting time on new-coming viewers, where D is the length of the video. We consider a set of videos, each being broadcast by the FB scheme. Since the demand levels on these videos may change with time, it is sometimes inevitable to change the numbers of channels assigned to some videos. We propose a novel seamless channel transition enhancement on top of the FB scheme to dynamically change the number of channels assigned to a video on-the-fly. Clients currently viewing this video will not experience any disruption because of the transition. A channel allocation scheme is also proposed based on the arrival rates of videos to minimize the average waiting experienced by all viewers. From the system manager's point of view, the enhancement will make the FB scheme more attractive.