Providing Interactive Functions through Active Client Buffer Management in Partitioned Video Broadcast

Partitioned video broadcast divides a video into segments and sends each segment over one channel in cycles. In this paper, we propose an active buuer management scheme to provide interactive functions in partitioned video broadcast. The scheme uses client side buuering 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 broadcast channels based on the observation of the play point in its local buuer. The contents of the buuer are adjusted in such a way that the relative position of the play point is kept in the middle part of the buuer and a high probability of providing the interactive functions with the contents of the local buuer is achieved. Discontinuous interactive functions are used to deal with cases where the local buuering is not suucient to provide some desired interaction. We design a new video partitioning that is more suitable for interactive behaviors of clients. We introduce the concept of feasible points which allows a client to move only to those points within the broadcast stream that can preserve the continuity of playback. Our simulations show that the active buuer management scheme can implement interactive actions through buuering with a very high probability in a wide range of user interaction levels.