An efficient bandwidth-sharing technique for true video on demand systems

Patching is a cost efficient channel-sharing technique for video-on-demand systems. However, its performance is limited due to the fact that a video stream cannot be shared unless it delivers the video in its entirety. As a result, larger and larger patches are required to serve new requests as the temporal distance increases. To avoid the overwhelming accumulation of patching cost, the entire video must be delivered frequently. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a new technique called Transition Patching. Our performance study shows that the new scheme outperforms the existing approach under all scenarios. In particular, the performance gain is more significant when the request rate is higher. We note that such improvement is achieved without extra download bandwidth required at the client site. The implementation cost, therefore, is the same as the original Patching scheme.