A new patching channel schedule scheme for video multicast

A new patching schedule scheme for video multicast is proposed The response to requests is modeled as a renewal process, and we prove that there exists an optimal value for the renewal period; in addition, a searching approach is presented to find this optimal value. The successive requests in a period are divided into a set of groups, based on which the patching streams are further patched in each group. Simulation results show that the proposed patching scheme outperforms the conventional patching technique by a significant margin in reducing the server network-I/O bandwidth. It even performs better than the dynamic skyscraper algorithm over a wide range of client request rates. Furthermore, it is reasonably competitive with hierarchical multicast stream merging (HMSM) at low to modest client request rates. Most importantly, the implementation complexity of our algorithm is much lower than the skyscraper and HMSM.