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Controlled Buffer Sharing in Continuous Media Servers

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Abstract

Continuous media servers manage delay sensitive data such as audio and video clips. Once a server initiates the display of a clip on behalf of a client, it must deliver the data to the client in a manner that prevents data starvation. Otherwise, its display may suffer from disruptions and delays, termed hiccups. A hiccup-free display is important to a number of applications such as video-on-demand for entertainment, distance learning, news dissemination, etc. Buffer sharing enables a server to trade memory for disk bandwidth to service multiple clients by sharing data in memory, using a single disk stream. However, an uncontrolled buffer sharing scheme may reduce system performance.

This paper presents Controlled Buffer Sharing (CBS) as a novel framework that facilitates sharing and supports both a hiccup-free display and VCR operations. It includes a configuration planner and a buffer pool management technique (applied at run time). CBS trades memory for disk bandwidth in order to meet the performance objectives of an application and minimize cost per stream. It uses bridging and merges two displays referencing the same clip when they are d t blocks apart. One insight of this framework is that d t is determined by market forces (cost of memory and disk bandwidth) and is independent of a clip's frequency of access. We use both analytical and simulation models to quantify the characteristics of CBS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, 90089

    Weifeng Shi & Shahram Ghandeharizadeh

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  1. Weifeng Shi
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  2. Shahram Ghandeharizadeh
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Shi, W., Ghandeharizadeh, S. Controlled Buffer Sharing in Continuous Media Servers. Multimedia Tools and Applications 23, 131–159 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MTAP.0000026844.21853.03

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