Seamless Channel Transition for the Modified BroadCatch Broadcasting Scheme

In this paper, we present a scheme that possess seamless channel transition property and is suitable for heterogeneous receivers simultaneously. We first modify the BroadCatch (MBC) scheme [28][29] by allowing an arbitrary number of base channels defined in BroadCatch. We then propose a seamless channel transition enhancement on top of MBC so that service provider can be capable of adjusting the channel allocation policy to make the most benefit out of the available bandwidth. MBC is not only adaptive to receivers with heterogeneous bandwidth capacities but also with zero heterogeneous scalability when channel transition is performed. With zero heterogeneous scalability, new clients can benefit from newly added server channels without paying any extra cost. As compared with BroadCatch and Fast schemes, our results show that MBC greatly reduces startup latencies for low-end clients while slightly sacrifices those for high-end clients. Maximum buffering requirement is greatly reduced as well.