A New Fixed-Delay Broadcasting Protocol for Near Video-on-Demand Services

This work presents a novel fixed-delay broadcasting protocol for near video-on-demand service. Consider a film S is divided into n equal parts {S1, S2, ..., Sn} and played through k channels. Each segment Si must appear at least once every i+c-1 segments rather than i segments. The value of parameter c means that the users have to wait the time of c segments. Each channel of k channels is first partitioned into subchannels by a heuristic strategy. Then, a greedy approach is applied to assign the n segments to k channels. The waiting time is c times the duration of one segment. As a result, the proposed method outperforms the previous broadcasting methods in terms of the maximum waiting time, for the same number of channels. Key-Words: Broadcasting, Fixed-delay, Multimedia, Near Video-on-Demand, Protocol, Waiting Time.