Proxy-assisted periodic broadcast architecture for large-scale video streaming

Many multimedia applications rely on video streaming techniques. However, large scale video delivery is still challenging since it requires a large amount of resources. In this paper we propose a proxy-assisted periodic broadcast architecture for video delivery to a large number of clients over the Internet. Our video delivery technique is based on a combination of periodic broadcast by central server and proxy server caching. A proxy server caches either part or the entire video based on the video popularity. A video stored in the central server is partitioned into two parts, a server prefix and a server suffix, based on the aggregated demand for the video from all communities. In principle, the server prefix is delivered by unicast and the server suffix is delivered by periodic broadcast. The combination of proxy prefix and server prefix defines a wide spectrum of different video delivery modes. The transmission of a video can be either partially unicast or partially period broadcast depending on the relationship between proxy prefix and server prefix. We further define and solve the optimization problems for proxy prefix selection and server prefix selection in order to minimize the total resource requirements. Performance of our system is evaluated through a number of tests.