On The Design Of Stream Pumping Engines For Scalable Video-on Demand Systems

This paper presents the design of a generic video access device called the stream pumping engine (SPE) for various video applications such as scalable video-on-demand systems, or voluminous digital video storage. The SPE integrates both the storage and network controllers in one board and serves as the basic building block of digital multimedia server systems. Storage devices such as SCSI hard disk drives, or digital tapes, as well as network devices like Ethernet, and EtherSwitch can therefore be connected together in a more efficient way. This paper first outlines the design of the SPE, and then illustrates the interconnection structure of multiple SPEs and concludes with the applications of the SPE.