Constrained consonant broadcasting - a generalized periodic broadcasting scheme for large scale video streaming

Video-on-demand (VoD) systems that can serve hundreds to thousands of concurrent users are already widely available. However, to deploy metropolitan-scale VoD services for potentially tens of millions of users, current VoD systems are still limited in capacity, and expensive in cost. To tackle this challenge, this study proposes a new periodic broadcasting scheme, called constrained consonant broadcasting (CCB), for large-scale video streaming. CCB outperforms all existing periodic broadcasting schemes while at the same time addresses two important constraints in practice, namely client access bandwidth and buffer requirements. For example, with a client access bandwidth constraint of twice the video bit-rate, a client buffer of 20% of the video size, and a total system bandwidth equal to six times the video bit-rate, the proposed CCB scheme can reduce the maximum startup latency by 72% and 70% compared to the current state-of-the-art skyscraper broadcasting and greedy disk-conserving broadcasting schemes respectively.