Pyramid broadcasting for video-on-demand service

The proposed scheme of pyramid broadcasting is a new way of rendering Video On Demand service. In pyramid broadcasting, the most frequently requested movies are multiplexed on the broadcast network, resulting in radical improvement of access time and efficient bandwidth utilization. This is achieved by using storage at the receiving end. As the available bandwidth increases, the improvement in access time is exponential as opposed to just linear improvement as in the case of conventional broadcasting. The larger the bandwidth of the network, the better the access time gain due to pyramid broadcasting. As the access time requirement decreases, the bandwidth requirement in the case of conventional broadcasting increases linearly while the bandwidth requirement in the case of pyramid broadcasting increases only logarithmically. We provide analytical and experimental evaluations of pyramid broadcasting based on its implementation on ethernet LAN, illustrating its advantages.