Distributed service paradigm for remote video retrieval request

The per service cost have been serious impediment to wide spread usage of on-line digital continuous media service, especially in the entertainment arena. Although handling the continuous media may be achievable due to the technology advances in past few years, its competitiveness in the market with the existing service type such as video rental is still in question. In this paper, we propose a service paradigm for continuous media delivery in a distributed infrastructure in an effort to reduce the resource requirement to support a set of service requests. The storage resource and network resource to support a set of requests should be properly quantified to a uniform metric to measure the efficiency of the service schedule. We developed a cost model which maps the given service schedule to a quantity. The proposed cost model is used to capture the amortized resource requirement of the schedule and thus to measure the efficiency of the schedule. We develop a scheduling algorithm which strategically replicates the requested continuous media files at the various intermediate storages.