A Buffering Policy for Distributed Continuous Media Servers

Recent technological advances in computer, high-speed network, and data compression are accelerating the realization of media-on-demand (MOD) systems. In this paper, we investigate issues involved in the design of a distributed server to support MOD application. We describe Eager Pipelining Policy which utilizes resources, that are otherwise unused, to improve system performance. Eager Pipelining can be employed when the available bandwidth along the path from a source to a user exceeds the display bandwidth requirement of a referenced continuous media object. In this case, the policy will utilize disk and memory buuers of the intermediate nodes to deliver the object to the user eeciently.