Comparative Evaluation of Server-push and Client-pull Architectures for Multimedia Servers

Abstract

Realizing a wide range of multimedia services will require the development of high performance, integrated multimedia servers (or file systems) which can efficiently manage the storage, access, and transmission of audio, video, and textual objects. Traditionally storage servers have employed fundamentally different mechanisms for managing the storage and access of each of these objects. Whereas most conventional text file systems employ a client-pull architecture, most video servers proposed in the literature employ a server-push architecture. Hence, the most fundamental question is: what is an appropriate architecture for integrated multimediaservers? In this paper, we take a step towards addressing this question by outlining the qualitative and quantitative differences between the server-push and client-pull architectures. 1 Introduction Recent advances in computing and communication technologies have made it feasible as well as economically viable to provide on-line access to a var..