An Efficient Broadcast Scheme for Low Bit-Rate Media Streams

Abstract

Periodic Broadcast techniques rely on the server streams sharing for scalable delivery of popular videos. With constant endeavors, several recent studies indicate the server bandwidth utilization can be optimized by the contrived segmentation on each media title. Essentially, a media file needs to be fragmented into numerous smaller segments of precise lengths. This pre-requisite is, however, hard to meet in realistic packet-switching networks. Even if a segment can be sized roughly in a few bytes, the inevita-ble overhead of more induced packet headers becomes significant to deteriorate the bandwidth efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel broadcast design to preserve the effective band-width with no compromise of the original ser-vice scalability. Our new design elegantly con-trols the effect of the overhead on the bandwidth efficiency by only fragmenting the first segment. The latter segments are kept in the constant size as the full-sized packets. As a result, the pro-posed scheme can avoid the performance dete-rioration due to the induced overhead of seg-mentation, while accommodate the available server capacity to reduce the service latency. The performance study indicates our new scheme is constantly better than the existing competitors with all possible design options for the delivery of low bit-rate media streams.