A Seamless Broadcasting Scheme with Live Video Support

Abstract

Broadcasting schemes, such as the fast broadcasting and harmonic broadcasting schemes, significantly reduce the bandwidth requirement of video-on-demand services. In the real world, some history events are very hot. For example, every year in March, thousands of people connect to Internet to watch the live show of Oscar Night. Such actions easily cause the networks contested. However, the schemes mentioned previously cannot alleviate the problem because they do not support live broadcasting. In this paper, we analyze the requirements for transferring live videos. Based on the requirements, a time skewing approach is proposed to enable the broadcasting schemes to support live broadcasting. However, the improved schemes require extra bandwidth for live broadcasting once the length of live shows exceeds the default. Accordingly, we proposed a scalable binomial broadcasting scheme to transfer live videos using constant bandwidth by increasing clients’ waiting time. When the scheme finds that the length of a video exceeds the default, it doubles the length of to-be-played segments and then its required bandwidth is constant.