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As the Internet grows so does the desire for on-demand streams of many
types: movies, songs, news stories, stock quotes, and others. The
popularity of a specific stream may be so high that multicasting may
be the only way to satisfy the demand. In addition, clients
requesting a stream will want service as quickly as possible. This
may require repeated multicasts of the same stream to satisfy the
delay guarantees. Stream merging has the potential to help solve the
bandwidth problems created by heavy, low delay, demand for the same
stream. In this talk we describe the stream merging technique and how
it can be used to reduce bandwidth requirements at the stream server.
We describe a new quadratic off-line algorithm for minimizing
bandwidth. We describe the optimal solution for the fully loaded
case, where streams are requested at unit time intervals. It turns
out that the Fibonacci numbers play an important role in the analysis
of the fully loaded case. This is joint work with Amotz Bar-Noy of
AT&T Labs-Research.
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