Delay requirement for transmission of VBR videos in interactive broadcast environment

Since the variable-bit-rate (VBR) videos are more efficient than the videos encoded In constant-bit-rate (CBR), some broadcasting schemes such as Loss-Less and Bandwidth-Efficient (LLBE) [15] were proposed to deliver the VBR vides to the customers. Nevertheless, it is still an open issue to support the interactive functions in these broadcasting systems with VBR videos. In this paper, we propose a smoothing algorithm for the staggered broadcasting scheme to determine the delay requirement such that the customers after the interactive functions can successfully join back to the broadcasting channels transmitting the VBR videos. Under our proposed system, the interactive functions can be supported by either the contingency channel or client buffer. In order to ensure the continuous playback after the VCR operations, the customers merge into one of the CBR broadcasting channels but some smoothing delay will be introduced. From the simulation results, it is found that the customers are able to Join back to the broadcasting channels at more than 80% of the broadcasting time with smaller than 20 seconds when there are 10 broadcasting channels In the system.