LEMP Lightweight Efficient Multicast Protocol for Video on Demand.pdfVIP

LEMP: Lightweight Efficient Multicast Protocol for Video on Demand Panayotis Fouliras, Spiros Xanthos, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Athanasios Manitsaris University of Macedonia Egnatias 156, 540 06 Thessaloniki, Greece {pfoul, it0187, it0157, manits} @uom.gr ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose a new scalable application-layer protocol, specifically designed for data streaming applications with large client sets. This is based upon a control hierarchy of successive levels for the clients, has minimal overhead with constant number of messages per client, and is robust to client and network failures, making it suitable for wireless environments. The video server bandwidth utilization is also significantly reduced. We present an analysis and simulation results, showing that LEMP is near optimum in terms of performance. Keywords Video-on-Demand, multimedia, application-layer, protocol, chaining 1. INTRODUCTION The advance of communication technology has spawned a large number of services, previously too expensive or impossible to access for the average user. However, there are still services that require a large amount of bandwidth and the associated cost has not allowed them to achieve widespread use. Video-on-Demand (VoD) is one such service, composed of at least three entities, namely the video server, the customer’s client computer and the intermediate network. There are several conflicting requirements: Less bandwidth per video means more video streams (virtual channels) available per video server. Also, due to the nature of the Internet, it is not easy to avoid jitters by establishing isochronous virtual channels between the server and the client. The memory space occupied by a single video is often larger than the available memory on the client. Moreover, in a typical video service the client expects additional capabilities, such as fast forward, pause and rewind, not to mention interactive video. Many researchers have worked on the