Abstract
Many VoD broadcasting protocols have been proposed but very few of them were concerned with the user VCR-like interactivity such as fast forward and backward, jump forward and backward, pause and resume. The adopted broadcasting schemes within these protocols do not usually land themselves easily for interactivity operations without an excessive additional bandwidth and or latency. In this paper, we investigate and analyze simple and efficient forward interactivity operations within the Slotted Stream Taping SST protocol under its proactive mode. Different interactivity schemes are proposed and analytically evaluated. They differ in their aim to minimize the request satisfaction latency or the extra needed bandwidth or rather to find a balance between both. Analytical and numerical results show that a small user startup waiting time and a frequent client arrival rate minimize indeed the system and the network resources needed to handle interactivity operations. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.