A novel framework for improving bandwidth utilization for VBR video delivery over wide-area networks

There are great challenges in streaming variable-bit-rate video over wide-area networks due to the significant variation of network conditions. The utilization of the precious bandwidth of wide-area networks is often low in such streaming systems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to improve the bandwidth utilization from a new perspective. Instead of focusing on the performance of each single media stream, we aim to improve the overall bandwidth utilization for video streaming systems. We try to exploit the unoccupied bandwidth in ongoing streams and using it to deliver some prefetched data which can be used to facilitate future streaming. Preliminary results show that our mechanism has great potential to improve both the overall bandwidth utilization and the caching performance of the proxy servers in the streaming systems.