Periodic broadcast and patching services: implementation, measurement, and analysis in an Internet streaming video testbed

Multimedia streaming applications consume a significant amount of server and network resources due to the high bandwidth and long duration of audio and video clips. Patching and periodic broadcast schemes use multicast transmission and client buffering in innovative ways to reduce server and network resource use. Current research in this area has focussed on the theoretical aspects of these approaches, rather than on the challenges involved in implementing and deploying such scalable video transmission services. In this paper, we first describe the design and implementation of a flexible streaming video server and client testbed that can support emerging streaming services such as periodic broadcast and patching. We explore and present solutions to the system and network issues involved in actually implementing these services. Using this testbed, we conduct extensive experimental evaluations, measuring performance both at the server as well as end-end performance at the client, over the local network as well as over VBNS, and present key insights gained from our implementation and experimental evaluations.