“Scheduled-multicast” with application in multimedia networks

We introduce a novel transmission technique, termed “scheduled-multicast”. Scheduled-multicast uses existing or additional memory at internal nodes in the transmission paths from the server to the clients to buffer the data stream, and effectively reduce the bandwidth requirements. We designed a new protocol, scheduled-multicast protocol (SMP), and implemented a prototype system employing SMP to test out the feasibility of scheduled-multicast. The results from our experiments shows that SMP can greatly increase the scalability of the system (i.e., the number of concurrent clients who can be serviced) at a very small cost to the processor utilization. Given the positive results from our prototype, we believe SMP can be used to greatly enhance the scalability of large VoD systems at minimal infrastructure cost