Bulk prefetching with deadline-driven scheduling to minimize startup latency of continuous media servers
Seon Ho Kim · 2001
Researches on the continuous media (CM) servers have focused on the throughput issues because the most popular CM application has been the video-on-demand system which provides relatively long video clips or movies. Latency issue has received little atten-tion in such a system because a few seconds up to a few minutes latency is considered tolerable. However, as a variety of multime-dia applications are emerging, some applications begin to require interactive presentation of continuous media where the most chal-lenging issue is to minimize startup latency, i.e., minimizing the time between the issuing a request and the start of the display. This paper proposes bulk prefetching techniques to minimize startup latency and analyzes their performance on multi-disk CM servers utilizing a deadline-driven scheduling and random data placement. Simulation results demonstrate a fraction of a second startup la-tency, which is acceptable for most interactive applications. 1.