A Borrow-and-Return model to reduce client waiting time for broadcasting-based VOD services

Abstract

One way to broadcast a popular video is to use multiple channels, each broadcasting a portion of the video periodically. Among the many schemes falling in this category, this paper focuses on several representative schemes (such as FB [15], [18], Pagoda [22], [24], and RFS [26]), which all share a FSFC property by repeatedly broadcasting the First Segment of the video on the First Channel. We propose a general Borrow-and-Return model that can be immediately applied to any scheme owning the FSFC property to reduce the viewer's waiting time without increasing the number of channels required. Given a group of videos, the basic idea is to lend the free time slots of videos without viewers to those videos with viewers to speedup the latter's transmission. By so doing, some bandwidth may be vacated by the borrowing videos to benefit others' transmission. Effectiveness of this model is analyzed by applying it to the FB scheme.