Dynamic disk scheduling for multimedia storage servers

A multimedia storage server has two different classes of requests: real-time and nonreal-time classes. A real-time class such as a video and audio request requires that timely retrieval of data should be guaranteed whereas a nonreal-time class such as text request requires fast response time. We propose a disk scheduling algorithm satisfying the above two requirements by dynamically controlling the weight which is assigned to each class. The weight of a class is the fraction of bandwidth to be allocated to the class. The performance evaluation of this algorithm demonstrates the improvement of the average response time compared with that of the disk scheduling algorithm with static weight.