Support for continuous media in file servers
Jiawei Han, D. James Gemmell · 1995
Continuous media (CM), such as audio and video, fundamentally differ from traditional text and numeric data in that they have large transfer rate and storage space requirements, and real time deadlines must be met during their storage and retrieval. This thesis covers the issues involved in designing file servers that support continuous media. A rigorous model of the real time requirements is presented, and lower bounds are demonstrated for parameters such as buffer space. The sorting set disk scheduling algorithm is proposed, which balances disk latency reduction against successive read latencies. The sorting set approach has the advantage of being a generalization of previous approaches (including SCAN and round-robin), as well as yielding improved performance in certain cases. Conventional approaches to file system implementation are analysed for suitability in CM file servers, and new, or hybrid, solutions are proposed.