A Novel Video-On-Demand Storage Architecture for Supporting Constant Frame Rate with Variable Bit Rate Retrieval

. One of the quality of service (QOS) factors in video-ondemand (VOD) applications is to provide high resolution quality to end users. One way to achieve this is to provide a constant display frame rate (e.g., 30 frames/sec) at the display station. However, due to the nature of video files and compression technique applied, video frame sizes vary significantly from frame to frame. Therefore, although the display frame rate is fixed, data retrieval is a variable bit rate process. Conventional VOD storage servers assume a peak rate retrieval of video files. Therefore, the number of concurrent requests to the VOD server cannot be maximized. In this paper, we consider a VOD storage server which can support a fixed frame rate at the display and at the same time, variable bit rates retrieval of compressed video files. We describe 1) video files layout strategy, 2) request scheduling algorithm, 3) buffering issues and, 4) various VCR features support such that the number of concurrent request..

An architecture for an ATM network continuous media server exploiting temporal locality of access

With the continuing drop in the price of memory, Video-on-Demand (VoD) solutions that have so far focused on maximising the throughput of disk units with a minimal use of physical memory may now employ significant amounts of cache memory. The subject of this thesis is the study of a technique to best utilise a memory buffer within such a VoD solution. In particular, knowledge of the streams active on the server is used to allocate cache memory. Stream optimised caching exploits reuse of data among streams that are temporally close to each other within the same clip; the data fetched on behalf of the leading stream may be cached and reused by the following streams. Therefore, only the leading stream requires access to the physical disk and the potential level of service provision allowed by the server may be increased. The use of stream optimised caching may consequently be limited to environments where reuse of data is significant. As such, the technique examined within this thesis focuses on a classroom environment where user progress is generally linear and all users progress at approximately the same rate for such an environment, reuse of data is guaranteed. The analysis of stream optimised caching begins with a detailed theoretical discussion of the technique and suggests possible implementations. Later chapters describe both the design and construction of a prototype server that employs the caching technique, and experiments that use of the prototype to assess the effectiveness of the technique for the chosen environment using `emulated' users. The conclusions of these experiments indicate that stream optimised caching may be applicable to larger scale VoD systems than small scale teaching environments. Future development of stream optimised caching is considered