Abstract

Periodic broadcast protocols enable the efficient streaming of highly popular media files to large numbers of concurrent clients. Most previous periodic broadcast protocols, how- ever, assume that all clients can receive at the same rate, and also assume that available bandwidth is not time-varying. In this paper, we first develop a new periodic broadcast proto- col, Optimized Heterogeneous Periodic Broadcast (OHPB), that can be optimized for a given population of clients with heterogeneous reception bandwidths and quality-of-service requirements. The OHPB protocol utilizes an optimized segment size progression determined by solving a linear op- timization model that takes as input the client population characteristics and an objective function such as mean client startup delay. We then propose complementary client pro- tocols employing work-ahead buffering of data during play- back, so as to enable more uniform playback quality when the available bandwidth is time-varying.

 

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