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

I/O Scheduling for Digital Continuous Media Part II: VCR-like Operations

Advances in storage, compression, and network technology are making support for digital video and audio, collectively called continuous media (CM), possible. To provide economically feasible access to CM data an emerging service model is one in which many clients connect across a network to specialized CM servers (CMS). The continuous and real--time data needs in providing such a service requires effective resource management and scheduling of storage devices at the CMS. In this paper we study the effect of executing VCR--like operations by clients on the BSCAN[KHS94] scheduling strategy at the CMS. We first define a suite of primitive VCR--like operations that clients can execute to change the flow of CM data. The effect of the execution of such operations on BSCAN is then analyzed. We show that the uncontrolled change in the BSCAN schedule will affect clients' playback. In order to avoid breakdown in playback guarantees while executing VCR--like operations at the CMS we dev..