Extension of practical channel transition broadcasting for near video-on-demand applications

Abstract

Periodic broadcasting is a cost-effective solution for the large-scale distribution of popular videos. This strategy guarantees constant worst service latency to all clients, regardless of the number of video requests. The practical channel transition broadcasting (PCTB) scheme is an essential periodic broadcasting method that can dynamically add or release broadcasting channels (i.e., channel transition) according to video popularity. However, PCTB experiences bandwidth waste when performing channel transition. This study further finds that PCTB yields transition playback latency during channel addition. Therefore, an enhanced version referred to as PCTB+ is proposed to cause less bandwidth waste and lower transition playback latency. The applicability of this new scheme is verified, and an analytical evaluation is provided to demonstrate its performance advantage. The new scheme reduces bandwidth waste by 50 % to 100 % compared to the original PCTB scheme. Moreover, PCTB+ yields 50 % smaller transition playback latency than PCTB. The proposed scheme outperforms the seamless fast broadcasting (SFB) scheme for bandwidth waste under most conditions. No extra startup latency and client buffer demand are required when using PCTB+.