A Cost-Effective Interactive Broadcasting Protocol for Media Streaming

Abstract

On-demand media streaming can offer users instantly access of videos. Many Video-on-Demand (VoD) broadcasting protocols for the popular videos have been shown to be efficient to reach this ideal. Unfortunately, these techniques were optimized only for normal playback. Interactive services, such as fast-forward or rewind, are left intact as hard options. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel broadcasting protocol for the clients with sufficient disk buffer to enjoy VCR-style services. These users only need to accumulate three broadcast streams, while the server merely patches the unavailable momentarily. With this unique feature, we minimize the demands on the communication and storage bandwidths of all clients. As such, cost-effective interactive VoD services can be easily realized over a large population of users. We evaluate the overhead of the proposed scheme analytically, and perform an intensive emulation over all the situations of interactive services. Performance study shows that our scheme can provide the comparable services only demanding much less client bandwidths.