Adaptive channel management scheme for video broadcasting services

Traditional unicast VOD systems require huge amounts of the server network's bandwidth, so near-VOD systems using broadcast protocols have been proposed to reduce the bandwidth requirement. Such systems have not been able to allocate channels dynamically to adapt to environments where the popularity distribution of videos changes, because of the essential inflexibility of existing broadcasting protocols. We address dynamic channel allocation for video broadcasting services, and propose a channel management technique that can adapt well to the dynamic environment, using a flexible broadcasting scheme presented in our previous work (2005). Our channel management scheme decides how many channels should be allocated to each video to maximize the system throughput, based on the video's popularity and reneging probability. The proposed scheme has been verified using extensive simulation.