A Reactive Broadcasting Protocol for Video on Demand
Proceedings of the Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference
Abstract
Broadcasting can reduce the cost of video on demand services by distributing in a more efficient fashion videos that are simultaneously watched by many viewers. Rather than waiting for individual requests, broadcasting schedules ahead of time repeated broadcasts of the various segments of a video. Hence, it performs best when it is used to distribute videos that are concurrently watched by hundreds or thousands of viewers. We propose in this paper a reactive broadcasting protocol that addresses the problem of distributing moderately popular videos in an efficient fashion. Like all efficient broadcasting protocols, reactive broadcasting assumes that the customer set-top box has enough local storage to store at least one half of each video being watched. Unlike other broadcasting protocols, reactive broadcasting only broadcasts the later portions of each video being distributed. The initial segment of each video is distributed on demand using a stream tapping protocol. Our simulations show that reactive broadcasting outperforms both purely reactive and purely proactive approaches for a large range of video request rates.