Abstract
On-demand media streaming can offer users instantly access of videos, many on-demand broadcasting protocols for popular videos have been shown to be efficient. However, these techniques were optimized only for normal playback. Interactive services, such as fast-forward or rewind, are left intact as hard options. To meet this challenge, a novel broadcasting protocol is proposed in this thesis. In our design, users only need to accumulate three broadcast streams, while the server patches the unavailable momentarily. With this feature, the demands on the communication and storage bandwidth of all clients are minimized. Besides, a few server channels are reserved to increase the broadcast frequency of the video segments to significantly reduce the patch bandwidth. As such, cost-effective interactive media streaming services can be realized over a large population of users. The overhead of the proposed scheme is evaluated analytically, and an overall emulation over all the situations of interactive services is performed. Performance study shows that our scheme can provide comparable services only demanding much less client bandwidth. On the other hand, we also investigate the time-variant popularity of media titles. Specifically, we reveal the credulous superstition of using fixed number of service channels to deliver each media title in periodic broadcast protocols. We propose in this thesis a dynamic broadcast protocol. The service channels allocation can be dynamically adjusted on the fly to reflect the most recent popularity distribution. Users will not experience additional waiting time or any disruption on media playback during the channel transition. Performance study shows that the design can further improve the average service latency.