Providing interactive functions for staggered multicast near video-on-demand systems

We propose a scheme to provide interactive functions through active buffer management at the client side for staggered multicast near VOD systems. The scheme uses client side buffering in a novel fashion that relies on the simultaneous availability of "past", "present" and "future" parts of a video and lets the client selectively prefetch segments from multicast channels based on the observation of the play point in its local buffer. The contents of the buffer are adjusted in such a way that the relative position of the play point is kept in the middle part of the buffer and a high probability of providing the interactive functions with the contents of the local buffer is achieved. We perform several simulations and find that the active buffer management is an effective method to provide interactive functions in these systems.