Periodic Broadcast Protocol for Heterogeneous Receivers

Video-on-Demand is undoubtedly a promising technology for many important applications. Several periodic broadcast techniques have been proposed for the cost-effective implementation of such systems. However, the once-and-for-all implementation strategies of these broadcast schemes imply a common bandwidth requirement for all the clients. Multiresolution techniques address this issue by sacrificing video quality. We present an alternative approach which does not have this drawback. Our protocol, the HEterogeneous Receiver-Oriented (HeRO) Broadcasting, allows receivers of various communication capabilities to share the same periodic broadcast, and therefore enjoy the same video quality while requiring very little buffer space. This is achieved using a new data segmentation scheme with a surprising property. We present the broadcast technique, and compare its performance with that of existing methods.