Hybrid Broadcasting With Small Buffer Demand and Waiting Time for Video-on-Demand Applications

One way to broadcast a popular video is to partition the video into segments, which are transmitted on several channels currently and periodically. The approach lets multiple users share channels, and thus obtains high bandwidth utilization. Many previous studies such as the recursive frequency-splitting (RFS) and harmonic broadcasting schemes focus on decreasing clients' waiting time. Another issue on reduction of clients' buffer demands is also important, especially for the goal to provide video services using limited-capability client devices such as PDAs and set-top boxes (STBs). Related work includes the skyscraper broadcasting (SkB), client-centric approach (CCA), greedy disk-conserving broadcasting (GDB), and reverse fast broadcasting (RFB) schemes. By combining RFS and RFB, this paper designs a hybrid broadcasting scheme (HyB), which exhibits a good tradeoff between client buffering spaces and waiting time. In comparison with SkB, CCA, GDB, RFB, and RFS, HyB requires smallest buffers, only 25% of video size. For waiting time, the scheme also outperforms all the schemes, except RFS.