New client admission

A new client first contacts the server. This allows the VoD service provider to keep track of the clients that have requested the service. The disadvantage of this approach is that the server becomes the single contact point. In practice, a VoD service provider can deploy multiple servers and use mapping techniques to guide clients to different servers to achieve the load balancing. Here we focus on the single server scenario.

As with the patching scheme proposed in the IP multicast setting [1,2], all clients arriving within the threshold form a session. A new client that cannot join the most recent session starts a new session. The server streams the entire video to this client.

If the new client belongs to an already existing session, i.e., the difference between the first client's and the new client's arrival time is smaller than the threshold, it tries to join this session's base tree. Meanwhile, the new client tries to select a patch server in its session that can stream the patch to it. If the new client successfully joins the base tree and selects a patch server, it is admitted. Because of the limited bandwidth at the server and in the network, if a new client is not able to find a path with sufficient bandwidth to join the base tree, or to obtain the patch from a peer client or the server, the client will be rejected.

P2Cast combines the patch server selection process with the base tree joining process in order to help minimize the clients' joining delay. The detailed algorithm used in P2Cast is illustrated in Section 3.