Server bandwidth has been identified as a major bottleneck in large Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems. Using multicast delivery to serve popular content helps increase scalability by making efficient use of server bandwidth. In addition, recent research has focused on proactive schemes in which the server periodically multicasts popular content without explicit requests from clients. Proactive schemes are attractive because they consume bounded server bandwidth irrespective of client arrival rate. In this work, we describe Fuzzycast, a scalable periodic multicast scheme that uses simple techniques to provide video on demand at reasonable client start-up times while consuming optimum server bandwidth. We start with a theoretically optimum scheme for providing scalable multicast video-on-demand and analyze its performance. We go on to consider a series of issues that are of both theoretical and real-world importance, including support for variable-bitrate (VBR) media and optimum transmission over multiple multicast groups.
By: Ramaprabhu Janakiraman, Marcel Waldvogel, Wei Deng and Lihao Xu
Published in: RZ3495 in 2003
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