Batching and dynamic allocation techniques for increasing the stream capacity of an on-demand media server

A server for an interactive distributed multimedia system may require thousands of gigabytes of storage space and high I/O bandwidth. In order to maximize system utilization, and thus minimize cost, the load must be balanced among the server's disks, interconnection network and scheduler. Many algorithms for maximizing retrieval capacity from the storage system have been proposed. The paper presents techniques for improving server capacity by assigning media requests to the nodes of a server so as to balance the load on the interconnection network and the scheduling nodes. Five policies for request assignment are developed. The performance of these policies on an implementation of a server model developed earlier is presented.