Efficient Buffer Management for Scalable Media-on-Demand

Abstract

Widespread availability of high-speed networks and fast, cheap computation have rendered high-quality Media-on-Demand (MoD) feasible. Research on scalable MoD has resulted in many efficient schemes that involve segmentation and asynchronous broadcast of media data, requiring clients to buffer and reorder out-of-order segments efficiently for serial playout.

In such schemes, buffer space requirements run to several hundred megabytes and hence require efficient buffer management techniques involving both primary memory and secondary storage: while disk sizes have increased exponentially, access speeds have not kept pace at all.

The conversion of out-of-order arrival to in-order playout suggests the use of external memory priority queues, but their content-agnostic nature prevents them from performing well under MoD loads. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a series of simple heuristic schemes which, in simulation studies and in combination with our scalable MoD scheme, achieve significant improvements in storage performance over existing schemes.

Documents

• PDF (6 pages, 122 kBytes)
• Other related papers in the Fuzzycast project: Fuzzycast: Efficient Video-on-demand over Multicast (Infocom 2002) and Efficient Media-on-demand over multiple Multicast groups (Globecom Global Internet Symposium 2001).
• Part of the Fuzzycast project, related to Memory

BibTeX entry

@TechReport{waldvogel02buffer-techreport,
  Author =       {Marcel Waldvogel and Wei Deng and Ramaprabhu Janakiraman},
  Title =        {Efficient Buffer Management for Scalable Media-on-Demand},
  Institution =  {IBM},
  Type =         {Research Report},
  Number =       {RZ--3423},
  Year =         2002,
  Month =        jul
}