Buffer-Sharing Techniques in Service-Guaranteed Video Servers

  • Authors:

  • Wen-Jiin Tsai;Suh-Yin Lee

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. wjtsai@info1.csie.nctu.edu.tw;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1999

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Advances in networking and storage technology have made itpossible to deliver on-demand services over networks such as theemerging video-on- demand (VOD) applications. Although avariety of studies have been focused on designing video serverssuitable for VOD applications, the number of concurrent on-demandservices supported by such servers is often limited by the I/Obandwidth of the storage systems. Recently, several researchers havefocused on providing guaranteed services instead ofon-demand services in a VOD system. A service is said to beguaranteed if every viewer can be served within a specified waitingtime after the video has been subscribed. This paper describes amodel called a buffer-sharing autonomy, which combinesbatching and bridging techniques to provideguaranteed services to VOD systems. We also describe howbuffer-sharing techniques can be used in this model toprovide the same services with fewer buffer resource through the useof playback-rate alteration. Additionally, in order to make buffersharing efficient, it is important to group appropriate video streamstogether to share buffer resource. Four grouping policies areproposed for this purpose and the benefits yielded are also analyzedand compared. Finally, the results of our experiments show that theproposed buffer-sharing techniques promise the provision ofguaranteed video services at low cost.