FLB: A Novel Video-on-Demand Broadcasting Scheme Over Channel Limitation

Periodic broadcasting has proven to be very effective in saving bandwidth for Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, where segments of popular videos are transmitted periodically across multiple channels and the client must download video data from these channels simultaneously. Commercial digital video broadcast systems are limited to a single channel due to hardware constraints. The single-channel broadcasting schemes are proposed to solve this issue by transmitting data over a single channel, but the client latency is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel single-channel algorithm called FLexible Broadcasting (FLB). Specifically, we design an efficient video segment scheduling method to split the video into as many segments as possible to achieve low latency. Experiments show that FLB outperforms other single-channel schemes in both average and maximum latency, and does not require excessive buffers compared to other single-channel schemes.