Dynamic allocation and replication techniques for increasing the stream capacity of a media server
Divyesh Jadav, Alok N. Choudhary · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
High performance servers and high speed networks will form the backbone of the infrastructure required for distributed multimedia information systems. A server for an interactive distributed multimedia system may require thousands of gigabytes of storage space and high I/O bandwidth. In order to maximize system utilization, and thus minimize cost, it is essential that the load be balanced among each of the server's components vis. the disks, the interconnection network and the scheduler. Many algorithms for maximizing retrieval capacity from the storage system have been proposed in the literature. This paper presents techniques for improving server capacity by assigning media requests to the noes of a server so as to balance the load on the interconnection network and the scheduling nodes. Five policies for request assignment, round robin, minimum link allocation, minimum contention allocation, weighted minimum link allocation and weighted minimum contention allocation are developed. We also consider the issue of file replication, and develop two schemes for storing the replicas. The performance of these policies on a server model developed earlier is presented.