A framework for supporting previewing and VCR operations in a low bandwidth environment

Abstract

We propose a novel delivery mechanism called 2-Phase Ser-vice Model to deliver video data to home users connected to the Internet through a low-bandwidth device such as a modem. In our scheme, non-adjacent fragments of the re-quested video file are first downloaded to the client during Initialization Phase. The missing fragments are transmit-ted to the client as the video is being played out, using a novel pipelining technique. This scheme offers several ben-efits as follows. First, it allows the user to perform a quick preview through the video with minimal delay. Second, it naturally supports VCR functionality with almost no de-lay as demonstrated by the simulation results shown in the paper. Finally, our mathematical analysis shows that de-spite the desirable features it offers, 2-Phase Service Model does not incur any more initialization delay than-that of the conventional pipelining technique