The enhanced staircase broadcasting for VBR 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. One representative approach is the Staircase Broadcasting (SB) scheme, which requires buffering only 25% of a playing video. However, the scheme mainly supports transmission of CBR-encoded videos. In this paper, we proposed a simple VBR staircase broadcasting (SVSB) scheme, which can distribute VBR-encoded videos with small buffers. The idea behind the scheme is asynchronous downloading and playing, and hybrid division by length and size. It is simple and effective. We also applied the design to several segmented broadcasting schemes, such as the harmonic-based broadcasting, and the recursive frequency-splitting (RFS) schemes, to enable them to support VBR videos. A simulation was conducted to evaluate the schemes. The results indicated that the SVSB scheme still outperforms on required buffers, and disk transfer rate at client end. The harmonic broadcasting scheme with VBR support consumes the least bandwidth.