A novel multichannel streaming scheme to reduce channel switching delay in application layer multicast

Video streaming services over the Internet are growing rapidly owing to the broadbandization of various networks. However, in such systems where a large number of users simultaneously access the same contents server, the convergence of the network traffic and service requests presents a significant problem. From this point of view, application layer multicast (ALM) has recently attracted much attention due to its scalability and feasibility in the current network systems. In ALM, user nodes construct a multicast tree structure to efficiently deliver an identical video streaming content. Various techniques to construct ALM trees have been designed to achieve improved performance in terms of shorter delay and higher reliability. However, in most of the existing ALM schemes, the performance in channel switching events has not been studied sufficiently; channel switching can be considered as the combination of the procedures for departing from the current and joining the future ALM trees, respectively. In general, node joining and departure processes take a certain time, which can be increased significantly depending on the network conditions whereby users are left waiting for the start of a new program on the switched channel. Therefore, reducing the channel switching delay is a significant issue in multichannel video streaming in ALM. In this paper, we propose a multichannel streaming scheme to reduce channel switching delay in ALM. Our scheme is based on an advanced ALM method dubbed network-aware hierarchical arrangement graph, which constructs node-disjoint multicast trees by utilizing the arrangement graph theory to achieve high robustness on node departures. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified through extensive computer simulations, which demonstrate that our proposed scheme succeeds in reducing the delay in channel switching without system throughput degradation.