A Live Harmonic Broadcasting Scheme for VBR-Encoded Hot Videos

With the growth of broadband networks, Video-on-Demand (VoD) has become realistic. Most of the significant broadcasting schemes have been proposed to reduce the server bandwidth requirement for Constant Bit-Rate (CBR) encoded videos. The few existing proposals, which support of the bandwidth-efficient Variable Bit-Rate (VBR) encoded videos, smooth and minimize the server bandwidth requirement at the cost of data losses. The lossless and bandwidth efficient (LLBE) scheme states that minimization of the server bandwidth as a shortest path problem on a directed acyclic graph, and uses a dynamic programming method to solve the problem. However, it cannot be used for support live video broadcasting. In this paper, we propose a live harmonic broadcasting (LHB) scheme to support VBR-encoded live video broadcasting. The ideas behind the scheme are (1) support VBR-encoded videos by asynchronous downloading and playing, and hybrid division by length and size, and (2) support live videos by postponing recasting process. It is simple and effective. Using data from real videos, we conduct a simulation to evaluate our scheme. The experiment results indicate that the LHB scheme requires slightly higher server bandwidth than LLBE scheme.