Generalized greedy broadcasting for efficient media-on-demand transmissions

To reduce the bandwidth of media-on-demand transmissions, different broadcasting techniques have been developed over the last years. For highly demanded media, proactive schemes have a lower bandwidth requirement compared to reactive ones. While some of the proactive schemes try to obtain an efficiency near to the theoretical limit, others have been developed to lower the bandwidth by partial preloading, additional playout delay, the use of breaks within the transmission or by exploiting bandwidth variations of variable-bit-rate media. In this article we describe how one of the most efficient proactive transmission schemes can further be improved and generalized so it supports all these additional enhancements and outperforms its predecessor and the specialized schemes.