An Empirical Study of Harmonic Broadcasting Protocols

Harmonic broadcasting protocols provide an efficient way to distribute on demand videos that are simultaneously watched by many viewers. Despite this, they were too often considered to be of marginal importance, due to the large numbers of independent data streams they require. We built a TCP/IP based client–server pair to measure the performance of the Cautious Harmonic Broadcasting protocol on conventional Fast Ethernet networks and found that a server with 512 MB of RAM could support up to 2,400 video streams and achieve a waiting time of less than six seconds for a three–hour video