Providing continuous VCR function with interpolated active buffer management for near VOD system on ubiquitous multimedia environment

A unicast video-on-demand (VOD) system is good at interactivity but bad at scalability. Many multicast schemes have been proposed to solve the scalability problem in recent years. However, the weakness of these schemes are lack of interactivity. Furthermore, most multicast schemes rely on a large number of buffer and bandwidth to prefetch a large portion of video content in order to keep the video can be playing back smoothly. There is no doubt that this will be a great challenge to the ubiquitous VoD environment. In this paper, we propose a buffer interpolation algorithm and a hybird channel scheme to reduce the requirement of client buffer and decrease the user service latency time. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme not only keep the video playing smoothly under less buffer, but also present quite good performance in the aspect of VCR action.