First segment partition for video-on-demand broadcasting protocols

Broadcasting is an efficient transmission scheme to provide on-demand service for very popular movies in a multicast environment. In this paper, a comparative study is first performed to evaluate various broadcasting protocols in terms of maximum waiting time, client buffer requirement and receiver bandwidth. It is found that some existing broadcasting schemes are not practical to provide a small delay video-on-demand (VoD) service if the client buffer size is not large enough. It is shown that the staggered and skyscraper protocols are the only feasible solutions to support an insensitive delay VoD system with limited client buffer and receiver bandwidth. Two first segment partition schemes are then proposed to further reduce the maximum waiting time of these two broadcasting schemes. The results show that if 15 min of video data can be stored in the buffer, Skyscraper with our proposed schemes can serve the customers within 10 s using 16 video channels. For Staggered broadcasting with our schemes, the maximum waiting time can also be reduced from 7.5 min to less than 1 min.