周期性廣播技術已被証實是可以有效的傳送熱門媒体資料－以一短暫的起始延遲時間。由於廣播本身的自然特質，上述方法將原本共享的伺服器串流做最佳化。由於這方法原本在排定使用者請求上便沒有任何過多的負擔，所以這些以伺服器端推動的設計方法比起其他即使是精心設計的客戶端推動方法較容易達成更好的服務品質可調性。不幸地，上述方法並沒有支援類似錄放影機的互動式服務，使用者只能夠按部就班的播放媒體資料。在這篇論文中，我們提出一個新穎的串流傳輸協定去彌補這樣的不足。這個想法是遞迴地將連續視訊畫面分成不同的群組，而不同的群組將以逐漸減少傳輸容量的方式對應到伺服器頻道上相對應的叢集。用這樣的設計，每個客戶端將被允許在沒有伺服器端介入的情形下，便可藉著適當地接收不同頻道來達到獨立執行各自的互動需求。所以，在沒有犧牲原本正常播放服務功能之下，互動服務的可調性便能最大化。效能評估並能夠証明，這個新技術能夠有意義的節省伺服器頻寬。

Periodic broadcast techniques have been demonstrated to effectively deliver the popular media contents with short startup delay. Due to the broadcast nature, this approach optimizes the server streams sharing by default. With essentially no overhead in scheduling user requests, these server-push schemes easily accomplish better service scalability than other elaborate client-pull designs. Unfortunately, there has been no support for interactive VCR-like services. Users are only allowed to playback the media title in a regular fashion. In this paper, we propose a novel streaming protocol to compensate for such shortage. The idea is to recursively split the successive video frames into several disjoint groups. Yet, different groups are served by the corresponding clusters of server channels at the reduced delivery capacity. With such design, each client is allowed to individually fulfill the specific interactivity requirement by tuning to the proper channels in the clusters with no server intervention. Consequently, the scalability of interactive services is maximized with no sacrifice on the support of the regular service demands. The performance study demonstrates significant server bandwidth saving can be realized using the proposed technique.

ABSTRACT I
TABLE OF CONTENTS II
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 2 JOINT BROADCAST (JB) 5
2.1 SINGLE CLUSTER FOR REGULAR PLAYBACK 5
2.2 MULTIPLE RECURSIVE CLUSTERS FOR FLEXIBLE INTERACTIONS 7
CHAPTER 3 PROVISION OF INTERACTIVE SERVICES 11
3.1 PLAYBACK AT VARIOUS SPEEDS 11
3.2 ADAPTIVE TUNING FOR BANDWIDTH HETEROGENEITY 15
3.3 FULL-FLEDGED SUPPORTS FOR FLEXIBLE INTERACTIONS 17
CHAPTER 4 PERFORMANCE STUDY 26
4.1 EFFECT OF SERVER BANDWIDTH 26
4.2 EFFECT OF CLIENT STORAGE CAPACITY 29
CHAPTER 5 CONCLUDING REMARKS 30
REFERENCES 31

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