Content distribution for seamless transmission

We introduce a new paradigm in information transmission, the concept of SEAMLESS TRANSMISSION, whereby any client in a network requesting a file starts receiving it immediately, and experiences no delays throughout the remainder of the downloading time. This notion is based on the partial caching concept [2] which was introduced to overcome some of the disadvantages of traditional cache replacement algorithms such as LRU and LRU-threshold [1]. The main idea of partial caching is to store an initial part of the file in the cache and to obtain the rest of the file from the origin server. To achieve the maximal retrieval performance of seamless transmission, clients must be prepared to re-sequence segments of the files received out of order. With this caveat, seamless transmission can be viewed as a way to implement strict quality of service (QoS) guarantees to all clients of a network. This paper gives a provably correct technique for achieving seamlessness for a given file located at the root node in a tree structured network.