Strategic replication of video files in a distributed environment

Abstract

The per service cost has been a serious impediment to wide spread usage of on-line digital continuous media service, especially in the entertainment arena. Although handling continuous media may be achievable due to technology advances in the past few years, its competitiveness in the market with existing service type such as video rental is still in question. In this paper, we propose a model for continuous media service in a distributed infrastructure which has a video warehouse and intermediate storages connected via a high speed communication network, 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. The distributed environment consists of a massive scale continuous media server called a video warehouse, and intermediate storages connected via a high speed communication network. An intermediate storage is located in each neighborhood, and its main purpose is to avoid the repeated delivery of the same file to a neighborhood. We consider a situation where a request for a video file is made sometime in advance. We develop a scheduling algorithm which strategically replicates the requested continuous media files at the various intermediate storages.