Data broadcasting and seamless channel transition for highly demanded videos

One way to broadcast a popular video is to use a number of dedicated channe ls, each responsible for broadcasting some portion of the video periodicall y in a predefined way. The stress on channels can be alleviated, and new vi ewers do not have to wait long to start their playback, Many approaches fal ling in this category have been proposed, One such scheme that interests us is the fast broadcasting (FB) scheme, which can broadcast a video using k channels by incurring at most O(D/2(k)) waiting time on new-coming viewers, where D is the length of the video. In this paper, we consider a set of vi deos, each being broadcast by the FB scheme, Since the levels of demands on these videos may change by time, it is sometimes inevitable to change the numbers of channels assigned to some videos. We propose a novel seamless ch annel transition enhancement on top of the FB scheme to dynamically change the number of channels assigned to a video on-the-fly. Clients currently vi ewing this video will not experience any disruption because of the transiti on. A channel allocation scheme is also proposed based on the arrival rates of videos to minimize the average waiting experienced by all viewers, From the system manager's point of view, the enhancement will make the FB schem e more attractive.