Efficient progressive downloading over multimedia broadcast multicast service
The paper introduces an efficient way of delivering multimedia files over the multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) and study the performance of the proposed MBMS download system on initial waiting time for progressive downloads of streamable contents. Multimedia streaming or downloading over broadcast and multicast networks is recently become conceivable for mobile users. Now there is an increasing interest to deliver broadcast and multicast data over the third generation (3G) networks such as The universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) since ''send once charge many times'' approach makes this type of services very attractive for 3G operators. The third generation partnership project (3GPP) has recently introduced MBMS to support IP multicasting services in UMTS. Streaming and downloading are two main services considered over MBMS. A third type of service, namely progressive download inherits the advantages of using download mechanism such as efficient usage of radio resources while it also enables users to stream multimedia files with some initial waiting time. However, there is few works that study progressive download in MBMS and current version of MBMS release have not yet an efficient mechanism to support progressive downloading. This article proposes a new approach for MBMS download mechanism that supports progressive download. The proposed systems are tested under various link conditions and packet loss scenarios specific for MBMS. The results, compared with the recent works, which have the same test assumptions, show a dramatic decrease in initial waiting time of the progressive download.