Batching policy for video-on-demand in multicast environment

A new batching scheme denoted double-rate (DR) batching is proposed to reduce the start-up delay of video-on-demand services in a multicast delivery system. When a new customer arrives, a unicast stream is immediately opened for the new request so that the customer does not have to wait. The transmission rate is then doubled so that the customer can catch up with the previous multicast stream. It is shown that the proposed batching scheme outperforms the greedy policy of the piggybacking approach in terms of the bandwidth requirement.