A scheduling scheme for continuous media data broadcasting with prefetching

Abstract

Recently, broadcasting continuous media data such as movies and music has been attracted great attention. In continuous media data broadcasting, it is important for clients to play data continuously without any interruptions until the end of the data. Accordingly, various schemes for reducing the bandwidth needed to satisfy the continuity condition are proposed. Several schemes prefetch the precedent portions of the data and broadcast divided data via many channels. However, for hardware restrictions and implementation complexity, the number of available channels, from which clients can concurrently receive the data, has an upper limit. This depresses performances of existing schemes. In this paper, we propose a scheduling scheme for continuous media data broadcasting with prefetching. By considering the number of available channels, our proposed scheme reduces the necessary bandwidth effectively.