Efficient staircase scheme with seamless channel transition mechanism

Video applications require large amount of bandwidth and also storage space. The Fast Broadcasting (FB) scheme is one of the simplest schemes to provide video services, but it requires considerably large buffer storage. This scheme assumes constant video popularity and thus has fixed amount of bandwidth requirement. The popularity of videos generally does not remain the same. It varies over a period of time and accordingly the bandwidth allocation should be adjusted. The variability in bandwidth requirement for videos based on popularity is overcome by incorporating seamless channel transition mechanism in a broadcasting scheme. After incorporating seamless channel transition mechanism, the scheme still delivers continuous video data to old and new users without jerks and hiccups. The FB scheme with seamless channel transition mechanism requires less buffer storage than the FB scheme. The staircase scheme also allocates a fixed amount of bandwidth to a video. The FB and staircase schemes divide a video into same number of segments; thus have same user’s waiting time. The basic difference between the FB and staircase schemes is that in the staircase scheme the segments are further divided into subsegments in order to reduce the buffer requirement. To consider variability of video popularity in the staircase scheme, seamless channel transition for staircase (SCTS) scheme has been discussed. The SCTS scheme performs better than the seamless Fast Broadcasting scheme as regard the buffer storage, while maintaining the same user’s waiting time. In this paper, we propose an efficient staircase scheme with seamless channel transition mechanism that performs better than the SCTS scheme. In the proposed scheme, the video (ESS scheme) data is downloaded at slower rate than that in the SCTS scheme without disrupting the user services and requiring less buffer storage.