Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A unified benchmarking and model-based framework for building QoS-aware streaming media services

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Multimedia Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

A number of technology and workload trends motivate us to consider the appropriate resource allocation mechanisms and policies for streaming media services in shared cluster environments. We present MediaGuard – a model-based infrastructure for building streaming media services – that can efficiently determine the fraction of server resources required to support a particular client request over its expected lifetime. The proposed solution is based on a unified cost function that uses a single value to reflect overall resource requirements such as the CPU, disk, memory, and bandwidth necessary to support a particular media stream based on its bit rate and whether it is likely to be served from memory or disk. We design a novel, time-segment-based memory model of a media server to efficiently determine in linear time whether a request will incur memory or disk access when given the history of previous accesses and the behavior of the server's main memory file buffer cache. Using the MediaGuard framework, we design two media services: (1) an efficient and accurate admission control service for streaming media servers that accounts for the impact of the server's main memory file buffer cache, and (2) a shared streaming media hosting service that can efficiently allocate the predefined shares of server resources to the hosted media services, while providing performance isolation and QoS guarantees among the hosted services. Our evaluation shows that, relative to a pessimistic admission control policy that assumes that all content must be served from disk, MediaGuard (as well as services that are built using it) deliver a factor of two improvement in server throughput.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Banga, G., Druschel, P., Mogul, J.: Resource containers: a new facility for resource management in server systems. In: Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI) (1999)

  2. Biersack, E., Thiesse, F.: Statistical admission control in video servers with constant data length retrieval of VBR streams. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Multimedia Modeling. France (1996)

  3. Chang, E., Zakhor, A.: Cost analyses for VBR video servers. In: Proceedings of IST/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking. San Jose (1996)

  4. Cherkasova, L., Gupta, M.: Characterizing locality, evolution, and life span of accesses in enterprise media server workloads. In: Proceedings of the ACM NOSSDAV. Miami Beach, FL, USA (2002)

  5. Cherkasova, L., Staley, L.: Measuring the capacity of a streaming media server in a utility data center environment. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Multimedia. Juan-les Pins, France (2002)

  6. Cherkasova, L., Staley, L.: Building a performance model of streaming media applications in utility data center environment. In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid). Tokyo, Japan (2003)

  7. Cherkasova, L., Tang, W., Vahdat, A.: MediaGuard: a model-based framework for building QoS-aware streaming media services. HP Labs Report No. HPL-2004-25 (2004)

  8. Cui, Y., Li, B., Nahrstedt, K.: oStream: asynchronous streaming multicast in application-layer overlay networks. IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., Special Issue on Recent Advances in Service Overlays 22(1) (2004)

  9. Dengler, J., Bernhardt, C., Biersack, E.: Deterministic admission control strategies in video servers with variable bit rate. In: Proceedings of the European Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Services (IDMS). Germany (1996)

  10. Dan, A., Dias, D., Mukherjee, R., Sitaram, D., Tewari, R.: Buffering and caching in large-scale video servers. In: Proceedings of COMPCON. San-Francisco, CA, USA (1995)

  11. Dan, A., Sitaram, D.: A generalized interval caching policy for mixed interactive and long video workloads. In: Proceedings of IST/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking. San-Jose, CA, USA (1996)

  12. Fu, Y., Vahdat, A.: SLA-based distributed resource allocation for streaming hosting systems. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (WCW-7). Boulder, CO, USA (2002)

  13. Gemmell, J., Christodoulakis, S.: Principles of delay sensitive multimedia data storage and retrieval. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 10(1) (1992)

  14. Jamin, S., Shenker, S., Zhang, L., Clark, D.: An admission control algorithm for predictive real-time service. In: Proceedings of the ACM NOSSDAV. LaJolla, CA, USA (1992)

  15. Jiang, X., Mohapatra, P.: Efficient admission control algorithms for multimedia servers. J. ACM Multimedia Syst. 7(4) (1999)

  16. Kamath, M., Ramamritham, K., Towsley, D.: Continuous media sharing in multimedia database systems. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications. Singapore (1995)

  17. Helix Universal Server from RealNetworks Comparative Load Test. Test Final Report, KeyLabs (2002) http://www.keylabs.com/results/realnetworks/helixcomparativeload.shtml

  18. Knightly, E., Zhang, H.: Traffic characterization and switch utilization using deterministic bounding interval dependent traffic models. In: Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM'95. Boston (1995)

  19. Knightly, E., Wrege, D., Lieberherr, J., Zhang, H.: Fundamental limits and tradeoffs of providing deterministic guarantees to VBR video traffic. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS'95. Ottawa, Canada

  20. Makaroff, D., Ng, R.: Schemes for implementing buffer sharing in continuous-media systems. Inf. Syst. 20(6) (1995)

  21. Makaroff, D., Neufeld, G., Hutchinson, N.: An evaluation of VBR disk admission algorithms for continuous media file servers. In: Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia'97. Seattle (1997)

  22. Makaroff, D., Neufeld, G., Hutchinson, N.: Network bandwidth allocation and admission control for a continuous media file server. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunications Services. Toulouse, France (1999)

  23. Nahrstedt, K., Hossain, A., Kang, S.-M.: A probe-based algorithm for QoS specification and adaptation. In: Proceedings of the 4th IFIP International Workshop on QoS (IWQoS). Paris, France (1996)

  24. Nahrstedt, K., Chu, H., Narayan, S.: QoS-aware resource management for distributed multimedia applications. J. High-Speed Netw., Special Issue on Multimedia Networking 8 (3–4) (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Neufeld, G., Makaroff, D., Hutchinson, N.: Design of a variable bit rate continuous media file server for an ATM network. In: Proceedings of the IST/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking. San-Jose, A, USA (1996)

  26. Ozden, B., Rastogi, R., Silberschatz, A., Martin, C.: Demand paging for movie-on-demand servers. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems. Tokyo, Japan (1995)

  27. Ozden, B., Rastogi, R., Silberschatz, A.: Buffer replacement algorithms for multimedia storage systems. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems. Tokyo, Japan (1996)

  28. Ranjan, S., Rolia, J., Fu, H., Knightly, E.: QoS-driven server migration for internet data centers. In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS). Miami Beach, USA (2002)

  29. Reddy, N., Willie, J.: Disk scheduling in multimedia I/O system. In: Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Anaheim (1993)

  30. Rotem, D., Zhao, J.: Buffer management for video database systems. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Database Engineering. Taipei, Taiwan (1995)

  31. Shenoy, P., Goyal, P., Rao, S., Vin, H.: Design considerations for the symphony integrated multimedia file system. ACM/Springer Multimedia Syst. J. 9(4), 337–352 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Tang, W., Fu, Y., Cherkasova, L., Vahdat, A.: MediSyn: a synthetic streaming media service workload generator. In: Proceedings of the ACM NOSSDAV. Monterey, CA, USA (2003)

  33. Tobagi, F., Pang, J., Baird, R., Gang, M.: Streaming RAID: a disk storage for video and audio files. In: Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia. Anaheim (1993)

  34. Urgaonkar, B., Shenoy, P., Roscoe, T.: Resource overbooking and application profiling in shared hosting platforms. In: Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). Boston, MA, USA (2002)

  35. Vin, H., Rangan, P.: Designing a multi-user HDTV storage server. IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. 11(1) (1993)

  36. Vin, H., Goyal, P., Goyal, A., Goyal, A.: A statistical admission control algorithm for multimedia servers. In: Proceedings of ACM Multimedia. San Francisco (1994)

  37. Yu, P., Chen, M., Kandlur, D.: Design and analysis of a grouped sweeping scheme for mutimedia storage management. In: Proceedings of the ACM NOSSDAV. San Diego (1992)

Download references

Author information

Author notes

  1. Wenting Tang

    Present address: VMware Inc., 3145 Porter Dr., Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA, 94303, USA

    Ludmila Cherkasova & Wenting Tang

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

    Amin Vahdat

Authors
  1. Ludmila Cherkasova
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Wenting Tang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Amin Vahdat
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wenting Tang.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Cherkasova, L., Tang, W. & Vahdat, A. A unified benchmarking and model-based framework for building QoS-aware streaming media services. Multimedia Systems 11, 532–549 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-006-0031-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-006-0031-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation