Providing Interactive Functions through Active Client-Buffer Management in Partitioned Video Multicast VoD Systems

Multicast delivery is an attractive approach to the provision of a video-on-demand service because it scales well to a very large number of clients. The problem is how to provide interactive functions to individual clients within the multicast framework without compromising the scalability of the multicast paradigm. In this paper, we propose an active buffer management scheme to provide interactive functions in partitioned video broadcast. Our scheme lets the client selectively prefetch segments from broadcast channels based on the observation of the play point in its local buffer. We introduce the concept of feasible points which can guarantee the continuity of playback after resuming normal play following VCR actions. Our simulations show that the active buffer management scheme can implement interactive actions through buffering with a very high probability in a wide range of user interaction levels.