A smooth recursive frequency-splitting scheme for broadcasting VBR-encoded hot videos

One way to broadcast a popular video is to partition the video into segments, which are broadcasted on several streams periodically. The approach lets multiple users share streams; thus, the stress on the scarce bandwidth can be alleviated without sacrificing viewers' waiting time. The segment partition can be categorized into two types: vertical and horizontal. One representative scheme based on vertical segmentation is the recursive frequency-splitting (RFS) broadcasting, which has the smallest waiting time in the literature. Based on the scheme, we propose a smooth RFS (SRFS) scheme, which can broadcast VBR-encoded videos smoothly. By dynamically arranging portions of the segments on the streams, the approach reduces the peak bandwidth consumption and the variance. Finally, we conducted a simulation to evaluate our scheme. The results indicate that the SRFS outperforms the RFS scheme on reducing the bandwidth variance and peak. The reductions can even reach 96% and 12%. The overhead is slightly higher average bandwidth.