Fuzzycast: efficient video-on-demand over multicast

Server bandwidth has been identified as a major bottleneck in large video-on-demand (VoD) systems. Using multicast delivery to serve popular content helps increase scalability by making efficient use of server bandwidth. In addition, recent research has focused on proactive schemes in which the server periodically multicasts popular content without explicit requests from clients. Proactive schemes are attractive because they consume bounded server bandwidth irrespective of client arrival rate. In this work, we describe Fuzzycast, a scalable periodic multicast scheme that uses simple techniques to provide video on demand at reasonable client start-up times while consuming optimal server bandwidth. We present a theoretical analysis of its bandwidth and client buffer requirements and prove its optimality. We study the effect of variable bitrate (VBR) media on Fuzzycast performance and propose a simple extension to transmit VBR media over constant-rate channels. Finally, we solve the problem of partitioning a transmission over multiple multicast groups by considering it as a specific instance of a more widely encountered resource trade-off.