An Efficient Transmission Scheme for Minimizing User Waiting Time in Video-On-Demand Systems

To take the advantage of skewed popularity of videos, efficient video-on-demand (VOD) systems are more likely to deliver the most popular videos through periodic broadcasting and the least popular videos through on-demand multicasting. While videos delivered through multicasting usually share a pool of server channels, broadcasting of each video demands one or more channels dedicated to it. Given a total number of available channels, distributing them for individual broadcasting and the multicasting pool to achieve the optimal average user waiting time is a nonlinear optimization problem. This letter addresses this problem by proposing a hybrid transmission scheme, which uses dynamic programming approach to ensure optimally for any given number of channels and request arrival rate