Providing VCR capabilities in large-scale video servers

  • Authors:

  • Jayanata K. Dey-Sircar;James D. Salehi;James F. Kurose;Don Towsley

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

  • Venue:
  • MULTIMEDIA '94 Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

Providing smooth playback capabilities for video servers, which must support potentially thousands of on-demand users, has been an area of active research. From a user's perspective, VCR functions of fast-forward and rewind (FF/Rew), are desirable features in video-on-demand. But FF/Rew at n times the regular playback rate requires n times the regular playback bandwidth from architectural components of the video server. Thus, guaranteeing sufficient bandwidth to enable users to perform FF/Rew reduces the number of supportable users by a factor of n. In this paper we propose an alternative, effective FF/Rew service, which provides FF/Rew capabilities with an associated statistical quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee. This service provides immediate access to full-resolution FF/Rew bandwidth with high probability. When bandwidth is not available, service is either delayed or provided immediately but with a loss in resolution. In addition, we specify several QoS metrics to characterize the delay or loss experienced by a FF/Rew request. We show that using effective FF/Rew with statistical guarantees on these QoS metrics results in a significant increase in the number of supportable users, when compared to systems in which FF/Rew bandwidth is statistically reserved for each user. Moreover, a playback-only video server can be extended to provide FF/Rew service by reserving only a small portion of its total bandwidth, which is dynamically shared among FF/Rew requests.