Parallel replication for distributed video-on-demand systems.

Lie, Wai-Kwok Peter.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-83).Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgments --- p.iiChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 2 --- Background & Related Work --- p.5Chapter 2.1 --- Early Work on Multimedia Servers --- p.6Chapter 2.2 --- Compression of Multimedia Data --- p.6Chapter 2.3 --- Multimedia File Systems --- p.7Chapter 2.4 --- Scheduling Support for Multimedia Systems --- p.8Chapter 2.5 --- Inter-media Synchronization --- p.9Chapter 2.6 --- Related Work on Replication in VOD Systems --- p.9Chapter 3 --- System Model --- p.12Chapter 4 --- Replication Methodology --- p.15Chapter 4.1 --- Replication Triggering Policy --- p.16Chapter 4.2 --- Source & Target Nodes Selection Policies --- p.17Chapter 4.3 --- Replication Policies --- p.18Chapter 4.3.1 --- Policy 1: Injected Sequential Replication --- p.20Chapter 4.3.2 --- Policy 2: Piggybacked Sequential Replication --- p.22Chapter 4.3.3 --- Policy 3: Injected Parallel Replication --- p.25Chapter 4.3.4 --- Policy 4: Piggybacked Parallel Replication --- p.28Chapter 4.3.5 --- Policy 5: Injected & Piggybacked Parallel Replication --- p.34Chapter 4.3.6 --- Policy 6: Multi-Source Injected & Piggybacked Parallel Replication --- p.36Chapter 4.4 --- Dereplication Policy --- p.37Chapter 5 --- Distributed Architecture for VOD Server --- p.39Chapter 5.1 --- Server Node --- p.40Chapter 5.2 --- Movie Manager --- p.42Chapter 5.3 --- Metadata Manager --- p.42Chapter 5.4 --- Protocols for Distributed VOD Architecture --- p.43Chapter 5.4.1 --- Protocol for Servicing New Customers --- p.43Chapter 5.4.2 --- Protocol for Servicing Existing Customers --- p.45Chapter 5.4.3 --- Protocol for Single/Multi-Source Injected & Parallel Replication --- p.46Chapter 5.4.4 --- Protocol for Dereplication --- p.48Chapter 5.5 --- Failure Handling --- p.49Chapter 5.5.1 --- Handling of Server Node Failures --- p.50Chapter 5.5.2 --- Handling of Movie Manager Failures --- p.52Chapter 6 --- Results --- p.55Chapter 6.1 --- Performance Metric --- p.56Chapter 6.2 --- Simulation Environment --- p.58Chapter 6.3 --- Results of Experiments without Dereplication --- p.59Chapter 6.3.1 --- Comparison of Different Replication Policies --- p.60Chapter 6.3.2 --- Effect of Early Acceptance/Migration --- p.61Chapter 6.3.3 --- Answer to the Resources Consumption Tradeoff issue --- p.62Chapter 6.3.4 --- Effect of Varying Movie Popularity Skewness --- p.64Chapter 6.3.5 --- Effect of Varying Replication Threshold --- p.64Chapter 6.3.6 --- Comparison of Different Target Node Selection Policies --- p.65Chapter 6.4 --- Overall Impact of Dynamic Replication --- p.66Chapter 7 --- Comparison with BSR-based Policy --- p.71Chapter 8 --- Conclusions --- p.75Chapter 8.1 --- Summary --- p.75Chapter 8.2 --- Future Research Directions --- p.76Bibliography --- p.7

On Utilization of Contributory Storage in Desktop Grids

The availability of desktop grids and shared computing platforms has popularized the use of contributory resources, such as desktops, as computing substrates for a variety of applications. However, addressing the exponentially growing storage demands of applications, especially in a contributory environment, remains a challenging research problem. In this report, we propose a transparent distributed storage system that harnesses the storage contributed by grid participants arranged in a peer-to-peer network to yield a scalable, robust, and self-organizing system. The novelty of our work lies in (i) design simplicity to facilitate actual use; (ii) support for easy integration with grid platforms; (iii) ingenious use of striping and error coding techniques to support very large data files; and (iv) the use of multicast techniques for data replication. Experimental results through simulations and an actual implementation show that our system can provide reliable and efficient storage with large file support for desktop grid applications

Scheduling soft real-time jobs over dual non-real-time servers

In this paper, we consider soft real-time systems with redundant off-the-shelf processing components (e.g., CPU, disk, network), and show how applications can exploit the redundancy to improve the system's ability of meeting response time goals (soft deadlines). We consider two scheduling policies, one that evenly distributes load (Balance), and one that partitions load according to job slackness (Chop). We evaluate the effectiveness of these policies through analysis and simulation. Our results show that by intelligently distributing jobs by their slackness amount the servers, Chop can significantly improve real-time performance. ©1996 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Performance and reliability optimisation of a data acquisition and logging system in an integrated component-handling environment

Thesis (M. Tech.) - Central University of Technology, Free State, 201

Interactivity And User-heterogeneity In On Demand Broadcast Video

Video-On-Demand (VOD) has appeared as an important technology for many multimedia applications such as news on demand, digital libraries, home entertainment, and distance learning. In its simplest form, delivery of a video stream requires a dedicated channel for each video session. This scheme is very expensive and non-scalable. To preserve server bandwidth, many users can share a channel using multicast. Two types of multicast have been considered. In a non-periodic multicast setting, users make video requests to the server; and it serves them according to some scheduling policy. In a periodic broadcast environment, the server does not wait for service requests. It broadcasts a video cyclically, e.g., a new stream of the same video is started every t seconds. Although, this type of approach does not guarantee true VOD, the worst service latency experienced by any client is less than t seconds. A distinct advantage of this approach is that it can serve a very large community of users using minimal server bandwidth. In VOD System it is desirable to provide the user with the video-cassette-recorder-like (VCR) capabilities such as fast-forwarding a video or jumping to a specific frame. This issue in the broadcast framework is addressed, where each video and its interactive version are broadcast repeatedly on the network. Existing techniques rely on data prefetching as the mechanism to provide this functionality. This approach provides limited usability since the prefetching rate cannot keep up with typical fast-forward speeds. In the same environment, end users might have access to different bandwidth capabilities at different times. Current periodic broadcast schemes, do not take advantage of high-bandwidth capabilities, nor do they adapt to the low-bandwidth limitation of the receivers. A heterogeneous technique is presented that can adapt to a range of receiving bandwidth capability. Given a server bandwidth and a range of different client bandwidths, users employing the proposed technique will choose either to use their full reception bandwidth capability and therefore accessing the video at a very short time, or using part or enough reception bandwidth at the expense of a longer access latency

Scalable, Data- intensive Network Computation

To enable groups of collaborating researchers at different locations to effectively share large datasets and investigate their spontaneous hypotheses on the fly, we are interested in de- veloping a distributed system that can be easily leveraged by a variety of data intensive applications. The system is composed of (i) a number of best effort logistical depots to en- able large-scale data sharing and in-network data processing, (ii) a set of end-to-end tools to effectively aggregate, manage and schedule a large number of network computations with attendant data movements, and (iii) a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) on top of the generic depot services for scalable data management. The logistical depot is extended by following the end-to-end principles and is modeled with a closed queuing network model. Its performance characteristics are studied by solving the steady state distributions of the model using local balance equations. The modeling results confirm that the wide area network is the performance bottleneck and running concurrent jobs can increase resource utilization and system throughput. As a novel contribution, techniques to effectively support resource demanding data- intensive applications using the ¯ne-grained depot services are developed. These techniques include instruction level scheduling of operations, dynamic co-scheduling of computation and replication, and adaptive workload control. Experiments in volume visualization have proved the effectiveness of these techniques. Due to the unique characteristic of data- intensive applications and our co-scheduling algorithm, a DHT is implemented on top of the basic storage and computation services. It demonstrates the potential of the Logistical Networking infrastructure to serve as a service creation platform

STCP: A New Transport Protocol for High-Speed Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol today and likely to be adopted in future high‐speed and optical networks. A number of literature works have been done to modify or tune the Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) principle in TCP to enhance the network performance. In this work, to efficiently take advantage of the available high bandwidth from the high‐speed and optical infrastructures, we propose a Stratified TCP (STCP) employing parallel virtual transmission layers in high‐speed networks. In this technique, the AIMD principle of TCP is modified to make more aggressive and efficient probing of the available link bandwidth, which in turn increases the performance. Simulation results show that STCP offers a considerable improvement in performance when compared with other TCP variants such as the conventional TCP protocol and Layered TCP (LTCP)

Records Management System: Indexing Standard, Document Standard, Technology Standard, Laboratory Configuration, 1997

Purpose of Records Management Sysytem indexing standards document is to develop indexing standards that will best support Iowa DOT's effort to build an agency-wide Records Management Syste