Wrap Harmonic Broadcasting and Receiving Scheme for Popular Video Service

Abstract

Broadcasting has been proved to be an efficacious approach of video-on-demand (VOD) service. Over the past few decades, many scholars have devoted a great deal of time to the study of broadcasting. Among all available schemes, harmonic broadcasting (HB) scheme points out the minimum bandwidth required to broadcast a popular video given a fixed viewers’ waiting time. HB divides each segment equally into several horizontal subsegments in line with the harmonic series. However, such segmentation is too complex to be feasible. To solve this problem, we come up with an original scheme dubbed wrap HB (WHB), in which we partition each segment equally into vertical subsegments according to its serial number. Given a fixed channel allocation, the maximum number of segments of our scheme approaches to the theoretical upper bound. Compared to the fast broadcasting scheme and the recursive frequency-splitting scheme, the buffer requirement in the WHB scheme decreases by 26%. We also design a simple VBR WHB (SVWHB) scheme to accommodate VBR video based on the WHB scheme. The comprehensive simulation results indicate that the SVWHB scheme has similar savings as the WHB scheme.