An adaptive harmonic broadcasting scheme with download and playback synchronisation for video on demand

Harmonic broadcasting is a broadcasting scheme to reduce the bandwidth requirement in video-on-demand service where a video is divided into segments of equal size and each segment is repeatedly transmitted over a number of channels having bandwidth that follows a harmonic series. As the bandwidth of channels differ from each other and a user can join at any time to these multicast channels, a synchronisation problem between download and playback is created. To deal with this issue, some schemes have been proposed, however, at the cost of additional or wastage of bandwidth. In this paper, we propose an adaptive harmonic broadcasting scheme that deals with the synchronisation problem at the same average bandwidth consumption as traditional harmonic broadcasting scheme. We present several analytical results to exhibit the efficiency of the proposed scheme over the existing ones.