A novel batched multicast patching scheme for video broadcasting with low user delay

Reactive near-video-on-demand (NVOD) schemes provide instantaneous service, but the server bandwidth requirement becomes substantially high at high arrival rates. Proactive NVOID schemes are very attractive at high arrival rates but these introduce user delay, which can only be reduced by increasing the number of server streams. This paper proposes a new scheme, called batched multicast patching (BMP), which combines both reactive and proactive methods by multicasting patch streams to a batch of user requests for a video which is broadcast in a staggered manner. This scheme uses less number of server streams at both moderate and high arrival rates. The number of channels the client has to join concurrently is at most two. This scheme is less complex than other low user delay broadcasting protocols such as pyramid and harmonic broadcasting protocols.