Artículo

An Empirical Study of Harmonic Broadcasting Protocols

Une Etude Expérimentale des Protocoles Harmoniques de Diffusion

Cyrus Dara Vesuna and Jehan–François Pâris*

Department of Computer Science University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204–3010 Tel. (1) 713–743–3341 Fax (1) 713–743–3335. E–mail: paris@cs.uh.edu*

Article received on December 17,2003
Accepted on February 02, 2004

Abstract

Harmonic broadcasting protocols provide an efficient way to distribute on demand videos that are simultaneously watched by many viewers. Despite this, they were too often considered to be of marginal importance, due to the large numbers of independent data streams they require. We built a TCP/IP based client–server pair to measure the performance of the Cautious Harmonic Broadcasting protocol on conventional Fast Ethernet networks and found that a server with 512 MB of RAM could support up to 2,400 video streams and achieve a waiting time of less than six seconds for a three–hour video.

Keywords: Broadcasting, harmonic broadcasting, video–on–demand.

Résumé

Les protocoles harmoniques de diffusion constituent la solution la plus économique pour la distribution de vidéos à la demande á n très grand nombre de spectateurs. Ils requièrent malheureusement plusieurs centaines de flux de données indépendants par vidéo, ce qui leur a valu d'être généralement considérés de peu d'importance pratique. Nous avons construit une paire client/serveur nous permettant de mesurer l performance du protocole de << Cautious Harmonic Broadcasting >> utilisant TCP/IP sur un réseau Ethernet à 100 Mb/s et avons trouvé qu'un serveur comptant 512 Mo de mémoire pouvait gérer jusqu'à 2.400 flux simultanés, lui permettant ainsi de réaliser un temps d'attente de moins de six secondes pour une vidéo de trois heures.

Mots–clés: Diffusion, diffusion harmonique, vidéo à la demande.

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