Advanced pyramid broadcasting for video-on-demand

Broadcasting protocols are used to reduce the bandwidth requirement of distributing popular videos in video-on-demand system. The scheme proposed in (Z. Zhang et al., 2004) claimed that it can reduce the client buffer requirement and the server network bandwidth of mirrored-pyramid broadcasting scheme (H.S. Ma et al., 2000) without increasing the client access latency. The idea in (Z. Zhang et al., 2004) itself is good and has the potential to achieve the claimed good performance. However, the mismatch between the video segmentation and broadcasting protocol leaves the results problematic. We present the remedy in this paper and analyze the performance of the revised broadcasting protocol. We compare the revised protocol with the enhanced mirrored-pyramid broadcasting protocol (H.S. Ma et al., 2000); the results show that the revised protocol does improve the client buffer requirement without sacrificing the server bandwidth and client access latency.