Managing large scale broadband multimedia services on distributed media servers

Abstract

The paper presents algorithms and principles for the management of large scale broadband multimedia services. For the implementation of these services, we use a network of distributed media servers, storing broadband media information e.g. audio and video that are streamed from the server to the connected clients. The problem studied in the paper is the managing of media content on a server network. We present the "Distributed Server Management System (DSMS)" that performs an efficient content and service management on the distributed servers. The DSMS allows one to collect access patterns from the users of the multimedia services and uses this knowledge for the solution of some combinatorial optimization algorithms that have to be solved for an efficient assignment of media assets. We present these optimization algorithms and evaluate their performance using some benchmark instances.