Network Bandwidth Requirements for Scalable On-Demand Streaming

Abstract

Previously proposed streaming protocols using broadcast or multicast are able to deliver multimedia files on-demand with required server bandwidth that grows much slower than linearly with request rate, or with the inverse of client start-up delay. The same efficiencies can be achieved for network bandwidth if delivery is over a true broadcast channel. This paper considers the required network bandwidth for on-demand streaming over multicast delivery trees. We consider both simple canonical delivery trees, and more complex cases in which delivery trees are constructed using both existing and new algorithms for randomly generated network topologies and client site locations. Results in this paper quantify the potential savings from use of multicast trees that are configured to minimize network bandwidth rather than the latency to the content server. Further, we determine the network bandwidth usage of particular immediate service and periodic broadcast on-demand streaming protocols. The periodic broadcast protocol is able to simultaneously achieve close to the minimum possible network and server bandwidth usage.