An efficient staircase-harmonic scheme for broadcasting popular videos

With the growth of broadband networks, Video-on-Demand (VoD) has become realistic. Many significant broadcasting schemes have been proposed to reduce the viewers' waiting time. However, clients are required to receive video segments altogether from all channels. This disregard incurs more buffer requirements. To escape from this constraint, we propose a novel interleaving staircase-harmonic broadcasting (ISHB) scheme, which focuses on buffer saving, and the viewers' waiting time approaches to theoretical lower bound. Furthermore, the scheme uses the interleaving technology to mitigate the effect of packet losses. Given a fixed bandwidth, the ISHB scheme buffers only 25% of a playing video. In comparison with the fast broadcasting (FB), recursive frequency-splitting (RFS) and interleaving harmonic broadcasting (IHB) schemes, the ISHB scheme saves the buffer requirements by 50%, 33% and 33%.