A Recursive Frequency-Splitting Scheme for Broadcasting Hot Videos in VOD Service.pdf

1348 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 50, NO. 8, AUGUST 2002 A Recursive Frequency-Splitting Scheme for Broadcasting Hot Videos in VOD Service Yu-Chee Tseng, Member, IEEE, Ming-Hour Yang, and Chi-He Chang Abstract—One way to broadcast a popular/hot video is to let multiple users share a few channels. The stress on the scarce chan- nels can be alleviated without sacrificing viewer waiting time. One common approach is to partition the video into fixed-length seg- ments, which are broadcast on several channels periodically. Two representative approaches are the Fast Broadcasting scheme and the PAGODA scheme, which can broadcast a video using chan- nels by having new viewers wait no longer than ( 2 ) and ( 5 2) time, respectively, where is the length of the video. In this paper, we propose a new scheme, called Recursive Frequency Splitting (RFS), that significantly improves on existing schemes in terms of viewer waiting time. Some lower bounds on the viewers’ waiting time are also developed. Index Terms—Broadband networks, broadcasting, cable TV, digital video broadcasting, scheduling, video-on-demand (VOD). I. INTRODUCTION W ITH THE advancement of broadband networking tech- nology and the growth of processor speed and disk ca- pacity, video-on-demand (VOD) services have become possible [20], [22]. Offering such services is likely to be popular in local residential areas, and viable in metropolitan areas in the near fu- ture. A VOD system is typically implemented by a client-server ar- chitecture supported by certain transport networks such as cable TV or satellite networks [5], [13], [27]. The simplest scheme is to dedicate a channel to each client [9], [21]. Many VCR- like functions may be provided (e.g., forward, rewind, pause, search, etc.). Since video is an isochronous medium, the video server has to reserve a sufficient amount of network bandwidth and input–output (I/O) bandwidth for each video stream before committing to a client’s request [11]. Such