A borrow-and-return model to reduce client waiting time for broadcasting-based VOD services

One way to broadcast a popular video is to use multiple channels, each broadcasting a portion of the video periodically. Among the many schemes falling in this category, this paper focuses on several representative schemes (such as FB, Pagoda, and RFS ), which all share a FSFC property by repeatedly broadcasting the first segment of the video on the first channel. We propose a general borrow-and-return model that can be immediately applied to any scheme owning the FSFC property to reduce the viewer´s waiting time without increasing the number of channels required. Given a group of videos, the basic idea is to lend the free time slots of videos without viewers to those videos with viewers to speedup the latter´s transmission. By so doing, some bandwidth may be vacated by the borrowing videos to benefit others´ transmission. The effectiveness of this model is analyzed by applying it to the FB scheme.