Data broadcasting and seamless channel transition for highly-demanded videos

One way to broadcast a popular video is to let multiple users share fewer channels. The stress on channel demand can be alleviated without sacrificing viewers´ waiting time. One such scheme that interests us is the fast broadcasting (FB) scheme (Juhn et al., 1997, 1998), which can broadcast a popular video using k channels without keeping newcoming viewers waiting for more than O(D/2^k) time, where D is the length of the video. In this paper, we propose two enhancements to the FB scheme. First, since the level of demand on a video may change by time, we show how to dynamically change the number of channels assigned to the video and seamlessly perform this transition. Clients currently viewing this video will not experience any disruption during the transition. Second, given a set of channels and a set of popular videos, we propose a scheme to assign these channels to the videos such that the average viewers´ waiting time is minimal. From the system manager´s point of view, these enhancements will make the FB scheme more attractive