Minimizing the Buffer Size in Fault-Tolerant Video Servers for VBR Streams

Minseok SONG
Heonshik SHIN

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E88-D    No.6    pp.1294-1298
Publication Date: 2005/06/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 10.1093/ietisy/e88-d.6.1294
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Dependable Computing
Keyword: 
video servers,  fault-tolerance,  parity grouping,  

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Summary: 
To guarantee the high reliability of video services, video servers usually adopt parity-encoding techniques in which data blocks and their associated parity blocks form a parity group. For real-time video service, all the blocks in a parity group are prefetched in order to cope with a possible disk failure, thereby incurring a buffering overhead. In this paper, we propose a new scheme called Round-level Parity Grouping (RPG) to reduce the buffer overhead while restoring VBR video streams in the presence of a faulty disk. RPG allows variable parity group sizes so that the exact amount of data is retrieved during each round. Based on RPG, we have developed a storage allocation algorithm for effective buffer management. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme reduces the buffer requirement by 20% to 25%.

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