Providing deterministic I/O service for VBR streams

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate mechanisms for providing deterministic service for Variable Bit Rate (VBR) streams at the disk. We propose a scheme for providing deterministic service within the I/O system. We evaluate data layout strategies and present an analysis of the results. We show that smoothing techniques can improve performance. We propose and evaluate several stream scheduling strategies. We show that the stream scheduling policies can have a significant impact on performance. We also quantify the improvements in stream throughput possible by using statistical guarantees instead of deterministic guarantees. We show that stream startup latency can be traded off for improving stream throughput (while retaining deterministic guarantees). 1 Introduction System level support of continuous media has been receiving wide attention. Continuous media impose timing requirements on the retrieval and delivery of data unlike traditional data such as text and images. Timely retrieval and de..