Efficient periodic broadcasting scheme for video delivery over a single channel

Abstract

Periodic broadcasting is one of the cost-effective solutions for distributing popular videos to clients under constant worst playback latency. The broadcasting methods typically transmit video segments across multiple channels simultaneously, thus, requiring a client to receive segments from these channels concurrently. However, numerous practical systems, such as digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H), do not allow clients to download video data from multiple channels because clients usually only have one tuner. To resolve this problem in multiple-channel broadcasting, the alternative broadcasting (AB) scheme, the hopping insertion (HI) scheme, SingBroad, PAS, the reverse-order scheduling (ROS) scheme, and the half-division broadcasting (HDB) scheme have been proposed to broadcast segments over a single channel. This paper presents a novel single-channel broadcasting scheme, which partitions a video into segments as many as possible to reduce video playback latency. Using mathematical analysis, this study verifies the workability of this scheme by demonstrating that client playback continuity is guaranteed. A performance analysis indicates that the proposed scheme yields the smallest waiting time, when compared with AB, HI, SingBroad, PAS, ROS, and HDB under various parameter settings. In addition, comprehensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme and ROS outperform these schemes (The comparison does not include the HI scheme because its buffer requirements are not provided in [24]) regarding smaller client buffer requirements under larger broadcasting bandwidth settings.