An adaptive borrow-and-return model for broadcasting videos

Yang etal. proposed the concept of borrow-and-return (BR) to leverage the unused server bandwidth when a group of popular videos being broadcast with the FSFC (first segment on the first channel) broadcasting schemes in order to improve the mean waiting time (MWT) of the viewers with the help of additional receiving bandwidth available at the high-end clients. The BR model borrows the bandwidth of the videos with no new-coming viewers during a timeslot to speed up the transmission of the first segments of some of the remaining videos. In this paper, we first address the relative advantage issue among various possible BR schemes by developing a parametric generic BR (GBR) scheme controlled externally by independent borrow parameters. Later, we propose a new BR (NBR) model by incorporating an efficient transmission strategy to reduce the MWT further. Finally, an optimal NBR scheme is developed by augmenting with the optimal borrow parameters, which significantly outperforms the existing and new BR schemes in terms of overall MWT. © 2009 IEEE.