BroadCatch: a periodic broadcast technique for heterogeneous video-on-demand

Many essential multimedia applications rely on video-on-demand technology to deliver a video to different users. A number of periodic broadcast techniques have been proposed for the cost-effective implementation of such systems. Most of these techniques would either try to minimize the server bandwidth, user bandwidth, user storage, user access latency to the video, or a combination of some of the aforementioned parameters. On the other hand, the implementation strategies of these broadcast schemes would necessitate a minimum bandwidth requirement for all users. Multi-resolution techniques address the heterogeneity problem by sacrificing user video quality. In this paper, we consider a different approach that does not possess this disadvantage. Using an incremental channel design at the server side, and a specific broadcast schedule, users can choose among a range of bandwidths to use to download the video at the cost of their access latency and not to the video quality. We prove the correctness of the proposed solution; provide mathematical analysis to demonstrate its heterogeneous behavior, and present performance studies to illustrate its efficiency.