University of Houston

We present a stream tapping protocol that involves clients in the video distribution process. As in conventional stream tapping, our protocol lets new clients tap the most recent broadcast of the video they are watching. While conventional stream tapping required the server to send to these clients the part of the video they missed, our protocol delegates this task to the clients that are already watching the video, thus greatly reducing the workload of the server. Unlike previous solutions involving clients in the video distribution process, our protocol works with clients that can only upload video data at a fraction of the video consumption rate. We are able to achieve dramatic reduction in the server workload. This, however, comes at the cost of increase in the network bandwidth consumption. We extend our protocol further to incorporate couple of mechanisms to control its network bandwidth consumption, and achieve a balance between server and network bandwidth comsump tions.