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 from all channels altogether. 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%.