Multimedia Network File Servers: Multi-Channel Delay Sensitive
Delay sensitive media such as audio and video are becoming integrated in the standard user interface. In this paper we consider simultaneous multiple access, such as would be performed by a multimedia network fileserver. To simplify the discussion, we consider only audio retrieval. The extension to storage and other delay sensitive datatypes is straightforward. This paper builds on the necessity of avoiding starvation of the consumer, and the assumption that certain sets of reads lead to a net increase in the number of samples buffered, to establish a theoretical framework for studying simultaneous multipleaccess. Our approach allows the possibility of splitting data into sorting sets for the purpose of reducing disk latencies, and gives an optimal algorithm for the reduction. It explicitly handles both contiguousandnon-contiguous file layouts. Using the theoretical framework, designers can evaluate the approach which is best suited to their situation.
Copyright © 1993 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library -http://www.acm.org/dl/.