How Can a Network Distribute Video Programs

Abstract

The network traffic, especially the video streaming traffic, has been increasing dramatically in recent years and this trend is deemed to continue for the foreseeable future. Video-On-Demand (VOD) is a promising technology for many important applications, and has become more and more popular among users. However, it suffers from several key problems: the network congestion, the increasing latency and the large amount of investment. A mature technology, Content Delivery Network (CND), with the benefits of reduced bandwidth consumption, reduced network congestion, and low network request delay, seems to be a perfect solution to this problem. However, the benefit is not significant compared with the increased investment and energy consumption of the network. A feasible solution to solve this problem is periodic broadcasting. The periodic broadcasting method allows the various receivers to share the same periodic broadcast channels, and therefore enjoy the same video with little bandwidth consumption. In this paper, based on the principle of periodic broadcasting, we propose a distribution scheme named OCPB to distribute video programs. In the OCPB scheme, the total network traffic increases very slowly (approximately Iogarithmically) with the increase of the number of clients. As the larger number of clients is, the more bandwidth we have saved.