Performance comparison and analysis of simple and hybrid multicast approach to prove its superiority

With the deployment of broadband networking technology, many clients are enabled to receive various Video on Demand (VoD) services. To support many clients, the network should be designed by considering the following factors: viewer's waiting time, buffer requirement at each client, number of channel required for video delivery, and video segmentation complexity. Among the currently available VoD service approaches, the Polyharmonic and Staircase broadcasting approaches show best performance with respect to each viewer's waiting time and buffer requirement, respectively. However, these approaches have the problem of dividing a video into too many segments, which causes very many channels to be managed and used at a time. To overcome this problem, we propose Polyharmonic-Staircase-Staggered (PSS) broadcasting approach that uses the Polyharmonic and Staircase approaches for the head part transmission and the Staggered approach for the tail part transmission. It is simple and bandwidth efficient. The numerical results demonstrate that our approach shows viewer's waiting time comparable to that in the Harmonic approach with a slight increase in the bandwidth requirement. More importantly, our approach shows the best performance in terms of the number of segments and the number of channels managed and used simultaneously, which is a critical factor in real operation of VoD services. Lastly, we present how to configure the system adaptively according to the video partitioning coefficient.