Buffer-sharing techniques in service-guaranteed video servers

Advances in networking and storage technology have made it possible to deliver on-demand services over networks such as the emerging video-on-demand (VOD) applications. Although a variety of studies have been focused on designing video servers suitable for VOD applications, the number of concurrent on-demand services supported by such servers is often limited by the I/O bandwidth of the storage systems. Recently, several researchers have focused on providing guaranteed services instead of on-demand services in a VOD system. A service is said to be guaranteed if every viewer can be served within a specified waiting time after the video has been subscribed. This paper describes a model called a buffer-sharing autonomy, which combines batching and bridging techniques to provide guaranteed services to VOD systems. We also describe how buffer-sharing techniques can be used in this model to provide the same services with fewer buffer resource through the use of playback-rate alteration. Additionally, in order to make buffer sharing efficient, it is important to group appropriate video streams together to share buffer resource. Four grouping policies are proposed for this purpose and the benefits yielded are also analyzed and compared. Finally, the results of our experiments show that the proposed buffer-sharing techniques promise the provision of guaranteed video services at low cost.