Exploiting client bandwidth for more efficient video broadcast

Several periodic broadcasting schemes have been shown to be very effective in addressing the bandwidth limitation in multimedia servers. Since this approach allows many users to share a server stream, its bandwidth requirement is independent of the number of users the system is designed to support. Existing broadcasting schemes use two or less download channels at the client end to receive data. We discuss the drawbacks of this approach, and propose a new technique which allows a video session to download data through several client channels. The number of channels which can be used simultaneously is limited only by the communication capability of the client system. We prove the correctness of this client-centric approach, and provide analytical evaluations to show that it has significantly better performance than skyscraper broadcasting technique which has been shown to offer the best performance to date.