A bucket-interleaving multiplexer for efficient near-on-demand streaming to resource-constrained clients

Bandwidth-optimal open-loop near-video-on-demand streaming (NVOD) entails the optimal assignment of transmission rates to a large number of program segments. These are transmitted concurrently and repetitively at their assigned rates. At any given time in its viewing of the program, a client must record data belonging to a contiguous subsequence of the segments for subsequent display. Limited client recording rates and storage capacity affect the rate assignments. In practice, the concurrent streams must be time-multiplexed onto a single channel, and efficient operation of the client disk drive used to store received data until its viewing prevents fine-grain multiplexing. The bucket-interleaving multiplexing scheme presented in this paper guarantees that each segment is repeated in its entirety within any contiguous time interval of the appropriate length, and reduces the required client "rate-smoothing" RAM buffer by two orders of magnitude relative to pure earliest-deadline-first multiplexing.