Performance study on implementation of VCR functionality in staggered broadcast video-on-demand systems

Data sharing is a feasible solution to support a large-scale video-on-demand (VoD) system, however, it is still an open issue to provide a full set of continuous interactive functions in such an environment that a single channel is used to serve a group of customers. In this paper, we first investigate the performance of client buffer management and its hybrid use with contingency channels for providing VCR functionality in a staggered broadcast VoD system. Results show that directly combining the two methods may not gain any advantages since the resources are not fully utilized. To tackle this problem, a greedy algorithm is proposed to efficiently manage the contingency channels such that the system performance can be significantly improved by exploiting the property of the staggered broadcast scheme and the use of multiple loaders in the receiver. Simulation results show that the proposed greedy system can efficiently provide a full set of VCR functions with satisfied user performance in a broadcast VoD system.