Efficient memory management in video on demand servers

In this article we present, analyse and evaluate a new memory management technique for video-on-demand servers. Our proposal, Memory Reservation Per Storage Device (MRPSD), relies on the allocation of a fixed, small number of memory buffers per storage device. Selecting adequate scheduling algorithms, information storage strategies and admission control mechanisms, we demonstrate that MRPSD is suited for the deterministic service of variable bit rate streams to intolerant clients. MRPSD allows large memory savings compared to traditional memory management techniques, based on the allocation of a certain amount of memory per client served, without a significant performance penaltyPublicad

Operating-system support for distributed multimedia

Multimedia applications place new demands upon processors, networks and operating systems. While some network designers, through ATM for example, have considered revolutionary approaches to supporting multimedia, the same cannot be said for operating systems designers. Most work is evolutionary in nature, attempting to identify additional features that can be added to existing systems to support multimedia. Here we describe the Pegasus project's attempt to build an integrated hardware and operating system environment from\ud the ground up specifically targeted towards multimedia

Distributed multimedia systems

A distributed multimedia system (DMS) is an integrated communication, computing, and information system that enables the processing, management, delivery, and presentation of synchronized multimedia information with quality-of-service guarantees. Multimedia information may include discrete media data, such as text, data, and images, and continuous media data, such as video and audio. Such a system enhances human communications by exploiting both visual and aural senses and provides the ultimate flexibility in work and entertainment, allowing one to collaborate with remote participants, view movies on demand, access on-line digital libraries from the desktop, and so forth. In this paper, we present a technical survey of a DMS. We give an overview of distributed multimedia systems, examine the fundamental concept of digital media, identify the applications, and survey the important enabling technologies.published_or_final_versio

Satellite-enabled interactive education: scenarios and systems architectures

There are specific sectors of the economy that can benefit from satellite-based tele-education. Areas, such as maritime and agriculture, share common needs for both broadband connectivity at remote geographical areas that cannot otherwise be covered, and for innovative content for tele-education purposes. Furthermore, each area has special requirements with regard to the type of content to be delivered. In this paper we propose a set of architectural designs and case scenarios that will realise such interactive end-to-end education systems based on satellite communications. Services requirements in this setting are also identified and discussed

Performance analysis of server selection schemes for Video on Demand servers

Web Services have gained considerable attention over the last few years. This is due to increase in use of the Internet which results in increased web traffic. Web servers find applications in E-commerce and Video-on-Demand(VoD) systems which have resulted in speedy growth of the web traffic. Therefore the concept of load balancer aimed to distribute the tasks to different Web Servers to reduce response times was introduced. Each request was assigned a Web Server decided by the load balancer in such a way that tasks were uniformly distributed among the available servers. Server selection algorithms are aimed to meet the QoS for interactive VoD.This thesis attempts to analyze the performance of FCFS, Randomized, Genetic algorithms and Heuristics algorithms for selecting server to meet the VoD requirement . Performance of these algorithms have been simulated with parameters like makespan and average resource utilization for different server models. This thesis presents an efficient heuristic called Ga-max-min for distributing the load among different servers. Heuristics like min-min and max-min are also applied to heterogeneous server farms and the result is compared with the proposed heuristic for VoD Servers. Ga-max-min was found to provide lower makespan and higher resource utilization than the genetic algorithm.Extensive simulations have been carried out by the simulator designed using MATLAB R2010a