Combined path and server selection in dynamic multimedia environments

Abstract

The evolving global information infrastructure consists of a widearea networking backbone that provides connectivity among service providers and clients requesting multimedia services via different applications. As this infrastructure scales, service providers replicate data and resources on the network to serve more concurrent clients. Adaptive and intelligent scheduling techniques are required to increase the utilization of their resources and handle an increasing number of requests. Scheduling for multimedia applications must guarantee desired Quality-of-Service (QoS) from both the network path and the server. Furthermore, with the increasing amount of mobile clients and highly dynamic network topologies, optimizing resource utilization becomes complicated. In a highly dynamic and ad-hoc environment where clients are mobile, load sensitive routing and scheduling techniques must be able to tolerate some information imprecision. The information collection and scheduling processes must cooperate with each other, they cannot be viewed as independent components in the QoS provisioning framework. This paper deals with a framework in which scheduling decisions are based on path as well as server qualities.