On G-networks and resource allocation in multimedia systems

Multimedia systems are gaining importance as novel computer and communication system architectures, which are specialized to the storage and transfer of video documents. Consider a multimedia-on-demand server which transmits video documents through a high-speed network, to geographically distributed clients. The server accumulates requests for specific documents in separate queues. The queues need to share the transmission medium in some fashion, typically in Round-Robin mode. We describe the resulting performance modeling problem, and develop an approximate representation using queuing networks. Our analytic model enables the efficient implementation of a new scheduling scheme, that we call the Local Round-Robin (LRR). We show that LRR yields significant improvement in system performance, compared to the original Round-Robin.