An Effective Hybrid Harmonic Staircase Broadcasting Protocol (HaSB) for Video-on-Demand System

Abstract

Video on demand (VoD) system is a service that enables the users to choose a video at any time and watch it. VoD systems have different protocols with different strategies for dividing the video segment and sending it by channels. The protocols in VoD have different analyses depending on several metrics that assess the performance, such as server bandwidth, client waiting time, and client buffer requirement. That can help the user to watch the video at any time they are needed, which reduces the waiting time when they select the video and start watching it. This paper proposes a new hybrid broadcasting protocol to link the advantages of harmonic and staircase broadcasting protocols for VOD to reduce the delay time once the viewer starts to stream the video and view it, where the buffer requirement of the client is reduced. HaSB protocols have integrated harmonic broadcasting (HB) protocol and staircase broadcasting protocol (SB) to obtain the strengths of small client waiting time and low client buffer space. Furthermore, HaSB has improved the buffer requirement in HB protocols and improved the waiting time in staircase broadcasting protocols. Finally, the obtained results show that the waiting time is 15 seconds and the buffer requirement is less than 25% with a bandwidth of Mbps. HaSB can produce a suitable result in reducing the waiting time and buffer requirement when compared with other broadcasting protocols.