Full-sharing: efficient bandwidth scheduling for video streaming over broadband cable networks (BCNs)

Broadband Cable Networks (BCNs) bring high-speed Internet access to home and make emerging multimedia streaming applications feasible. However, bandwidth contention is still a challenging problem in providing efficient IP-based Video-On-Demand (VOD) service on BCNs, due to the lack of effective approaches to exploit the unique characteristics of BCNs. To address the bandwidth contention issue, we propose an efficient video scheduling technique, called full-sharing scheduling in this paper. This technique fully exploits the unique characteristics of BCNs to reduce the bandwidth consumption of video sessions sharing a cable channel of fixed capacity, thereby maximizing the number of simultaneous video sessions on the single channel. Furthermore, we analyze the expected bandwidth and the session blocking probability of a video under the full-sharing scheduling. Based on this analysis, we design an efficient video assignment mechanism for maximizing the profit of a VOD system in scheduling videos on BCNs. Through both analysis and simulation, we show that our approach minimizes the bandwidth consumption of video sessions compared with the previous approaches and has significant advantages on BCNs. The proposed approach is also directly applicable on other broadcast/multicast networks in which clients have sufficient buffer and downstream bandwidth, e.g., satellite broadband networks.