Network bandwidth requirements for scalable on-demand streaming

Recently proposed streaming protocols are able to deliver multimedia files on-demand with the required server bandwidth growing only logarithmically with the file request rate. The same efficiencies are achieved for network bandwidth if delivery is over a true broadcast channel. This paper considers the required network bandwidth for on-demand streaming over multicast delivery trees. We consider both simple canonical delivery trees, and more complex cases in which delivery trees are constructed using both existing and new algorithms for various randomly generated network topologies and client site locations. Our results quantify the potential savings from the use of multicast trees that are configured to minimize network bandwidth rather than the latency to the content server. Further, we show that it is possible to achieve reasonably close to the minimum possible bandwidth usage for both network and server simultaneously, with a practical on-demand streaming protocol.