We consider the following basic question: a source node wishes to stream an ordered sequence of packets to a collection of receivers, which are distributed among a number of clusters. A node may send a packet to another node in its own cluster in one time step, whereas sending a packet to a node in a different cluster takes longer than one time step. Each cluster has two special nodes. We assume that the source and the special nodes in each cluster have a higher capacity and thus can send multiple packets at each step, while all other nodes can both send and receive a packet at each step. We construct two (intra-cluster) data communication schemes, one based on multi-trees (using a collection of interior-disjoint trees) and the other based on hypercubes. We use these approaches to explore the resulting playback delay, buffer space, and communication requirements.
Alix L. H. Chow, Leana Golubchik, Samir Khuller, Y