<title>Reactive broadcasting protocol for video on demand</title>

Abstract

We propose a reactive broadcasting protocol that addresses the problem of distributing moderately popular videos in a more efficient fashion. Like all efficient broadcasting protocols, reactive broadcasting assumes that the customer set-top box has enough local storage to store at least one half of each video being watched. Unlike other broadcasting protocols, reactive broadcasting only broadcasts the later portions of each video. the initial segment of each video is distributed on demand using a stream tapping protocol. Our simulations show that reactive broadcasting outperforms both conventional broadcasting protocols and pure stream tapping for a wide range of video request rates.