Efficient schemes for broadcasting popular videos

Abstract.

We provide a formal framework for studying broadcasting schemes and design a family of schemes for broadcasting popular videos, the greedy disk-conserving broadcasting (GDB) family. We analyze the resource requirements for GDB, i.e., the number of server broadcast channels, the client storage space, and the client I/O bandwidth required by GDB. Our analysis shows that all of our proposed broadcasting schemes are within a small factor of the optimal scheme in terms of the server bandwidth requirement. Furthermore, GDB exhibits a tradeoff between any two of the three resources. We compare our scheme with a recently proposed broadcasting scheme, skyscraper broadcasting (SB). With GDB, we can reduce the client storage space by as much as 50% or the number of server channels by as much as 30% at the cost of a small additional increase in the amount of client I/O bandwidth. If we require the client I/O bandwidth of GDB to be identical to that of SB, GDB needs only 70% of the client storage space required by SB or one less server channel than SB does. In addition, we show that with small client I/O bandwidth, the resource requirements of GDB are close to the minimum achievable by any disk-conserving broadcasting scheme.