Improving server broadcast efficiency through better utilization of client receiving bandwidth

Periodic broadcast is a cost-effective solution for disseminating popular videos. This strategy has the potential to serve a very large community with minimal broadcast bandwidth: regardless of the number of video requests, the worst service latency to all clients is constant. Although many efficient schemes have been proposed, most of them impose some rigid requirement on client receiving bandwidth. They either demand clients to have the same bandwidth as the video server, or limit them to receive no more than two video streams at any one time. In our previous work, we addressed this problem by proposing a client-centric approach (CCA). Unlike any other technique, CCA takes both server broadcast bandwidth and client receiving bandwidth into design consideration. More specifically, CCA allows clients to use all their receiving capability for prefetching broadcast data. Therefore, given a fixed broadcast bandwidth, CCA can achieve shorter broadcast period with an improved client communication capability. In this paper, we present a novel technique to further leverage client bandwidth for more efficient video broadcast. We prove the correctness of this new technique and provide analytical evaluations to show that with the same client bandwidth, it achieves significantly better performance than CCA.