Low cost pre-stored video transmission across networks

This paper proposes a simple, practical and low-cost dynamic segmentation and bandwidth allocation scheme, called middle point, to transmit pre-stored video from source to playback destination across networks. The proposed scheme is based on two concepts, playback tunnel and bandwidth tunnel, to determine the segmentation boundary and transmission bandwidth with the objective of reducing transmission cost while guaranteeing the playback buffer neither underflows nor overflows. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by a set of real-life MPEG video traces and also compared with the well-known optimal smoothing scheme. The obtained results show that the proposed scheme can be easily implemented with low complexity and low transmission cost.