Fuzzycast: Media Broadcasting for Multiple Asynchronous Receivers

When using an on-demand media streaming system on top of a network with Multicast support, it is sometimes more efficient to use broadcast to distribute popular content, especially when client demand is high. There has been a lot of research in broadcasting on-demand content to multiple, asynchronous receivers. In this paper, we propose a family of novel, practical techniques for broadcasting on-demand media, which achieve lowest known server/network bandwidth usage and I/O efficient client buffer management, while retain the simplicity of a frame-based single channel scheme. We also propose playout scheduling strategies that make it practicable for serving both constant bitrate (CBR) and variable bitrate (VBR) media.