Methodologies for designing video servers

This paper proposes an approach for integrating CPU/disk/network scheduling and memory management for supporting a variety of VCR operations and dynamic service changes efficiently. Under this approach we can optimize individual resources, and support a maximal number of clients on a given system. We present a framework of service modeling to characterize the requested video services and identify the scheduling parameters for supporting these services. A number of techniques and methodologies are developed for analyzing the behaviors of disk accesses, network operations, and CPU activities under the loads of both single and multiple clients. We also describe an admission control strategy that utilizes information about all the system resources to determine if a set of video service is acceptable.