Seamless channel transition for the staircase video broadcasting scheme

Abstract

In the literature, many broadcasting-based schemes have been proposed to efficiently support near-VOD services. However, none of these schemes allows the server to dynamically and seamlessly change the number of channels allocated to a video. Naively allocating a new set of channels for the transition could increase server's load, waste communication bandwidth, and even drain the channels of the system. In Tseng et al. (2000), it is shown how to enhance the Fast Broadcasting (FB) scheme for seamless channel transition. The problem remains open whether other broadcasting-based schemes can sustain seamless channel transition. In this paper, we show how to enhance the Staircase Broadcasting (SB) scheme so that a server can seamlessly increase or decrease the channels allocated to a video. The SB scheme has been proved to require significantly less buffering space than FB, while sustaining the same startup latency as FB. Detailed performance comparisons are presented to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme.