Scheduling methods for broadcasting multiple continuous media data

Abstract

Recently, various schemes for broadcasting continuous media data such as music or movies have been studied. These schemes reduce the waiting time for playing the data under the continuity condition, i.e., playing continuous media data without any intermittence until the end of the data. These schemes usually employ multiple channels to broadcast the data. However, most clients are not able to receive data from multiple channels concurrently. In this paper, we propose methods for reducing client waiting time for multiple data via a single channel. In our proposed methods, we divide each data into several segments and produce a schedule that includes the first segment of each data more frequent than the rest. By changing the number of segments according to the playback ratio, client waiting time is effectively reduced.