Real-time disk scanning for timely retrieval of continuous media objects

Abstract

In recent years, demands for multimedia applications have rapidly grown with the advances in computing power and network technology. To fulfill the demands, it is crucial to establish the multimedia information systems supporting continuous media (CM) streams without hiccups. Many useful methods have been proposed in the past so that CM steams with VCR-quality can be supported. Although these earlier approaches can be used for the service of VCR-quality streams, they cannot provide a good system performance for the CM streams with various playback rates and rather short durations of playback. In the paper, we propose a new CM playback method that consists of bulk-scanning and an earliest-deadline-first style scheduling algorithm. Our proposed method provides both good response times and high I/O utilization using the efficient disk scheduling. In addition, our mechanism for admission control makes CM streams never experience hiccups until the ends of playback. Through experimental analyses, we show the performance advantages of the proposed method over the earlier methods. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.