Practical Patching for Efficient Bandwidth Sharing in VOD Systems

Recursive Patching is an efficient multicast technique for large-scale video on demand systems and recursively shares existing video streams with asynchronous clients. When Recursive Patching initiates a transition stream, it always makes a transition stream have additional data for the worst future request. In order to share a VOD server's limited network bandwidth efficiently, this paper proposes Practical Patching that removes the unnecessary data included in the transition stream. The proposed Practical Patching dynamically expands ongoing transition streams when a new request actually arrives at the server. As a result, the transition streams never have unnecessary data. Simulation result confirmed that the proposed technique is better than Recursive Patching in terms of service latency and defection rate.