Dynamic real-time scheduling strategies for interactive continuous media servers

Abstract. In this paper, we propose and study a dynamic approach to schedule real-time requests in a video-on-demand (VOD) server. Providing quality of service in such servers requires uninterrupted and on-time retrieval of motion video data. VOD services and multimedia applications further require access to the storage devices to be shared among multiple concurrent streams. Most of the previous VOD scheduling approaches use limited run-time,0 information and thus cannot exploit the potential capacity of the system fully. Our approach improves throughput by making use of run-time information to relax admission control. It maintains excellent quality of service under varying playout rates by observing deadlines and by reallocating resources to guarantee continuous service. It also reduces start-up latency by beginning service as soon as it is detected that deadlines of all real-time requests will be met. We establish safe conditions for greedy admission, dynamic control of disk read sizes, fast initial service, and sporadic services. We conduct thorough simulations over a wide range of buffer capacities, load settings, and over varying playout rates to demonstrate the significant improvements in quality of service, throughput and start-up latency of our approach relative to a static approach.