The increasing use of streaming applications and wide variety of devices, such as handheld personal organizers, have raised new challenges, such as the provision of access to multimedia content for devices with limited computing and bandwidth capabilities. In this paper, we propose a technique for periodic broadcasting. Our technique allows clients with low bandwidth capability to be served in the same period as high-bandwidth clients, using peer-to-peer streaming between clients, and also works for clients with downstream capability below the video bit rate. In the proposed system, the server builds multicast trees of clients that allow clients with low bandwidth to be served by other clients with sufficient upstream bandwidth. Clients below the video bit rate will suffer additional, but only moderately noticeable, delays that occur as video is converted to lower quality. We performed extensive simulation and showed that our system can provide improved service performance for heterogeneous clients on periodic broadcasting protocols.
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