In designing a video-on-demand system, one of the major challenges is how to reduce the client's waiting time maintaining the concurrently used channels. For this reason, the hybrid architectures which integrate the multicast streams with the unicast streams were suggested in order to improve channel efficiency in recent years. In combining multicast with unicast, the ways to group the channels together are important so that more clients can share the multicast transmission channels. This paper proposes a hybrid video-on-demand system which gathers the unicast and multicast transmission channels efficiently by using dynamic channel allocation architecture. The newly proposed architecture can reduce the average client's waiting time significantly. The numerical results demonstrate that the dynamic channel allocation architecture in some case (e.g., 100-channel and 10-video system at 0.5 requests/second) achieves performance gain of 551% compared to existing architecture. This paper presents procedure of channel release and reuse, performance analysis, and simulation results of the dynamic channel allocation architecture.

In providing video programs to a number of clients through networks, a broadcasting approach is more appropriate than a true-video-on-demand approach in efficient use of bandwidth. However, the broadcasting approach also needs excessively wide bandwidth if many video programs are to be transmitted. This study presents a very simple but novel architecture called dynamic channel broadcasting, for video-on-demand systems. The proposed architecture uses both static and dynamic broadcasting channels to improve the efficiency of channels. The proposed architecture eliminates the necessity of dividing each video into segments and switching channels frequently unlike the pyramid broadcasting, the skyscraper broadcasting and the harmonic broadcasting. Also this new architecture needs a smaller buffer size. The numerical results demonstrate that the newly proposed approach in some cases requires only 14% of the bandwidth required for the conventional broadcasting while maintaining the start-up latency.