QoS Guarantee in Partial Failure of Clustered VOD Server

For large scale VOD service, cluster servers are spotlighted to their high performance and low cost. A cluster server usually consists of a front-end node and multiple back-end nodes. Though increasing the number of back-end nodes can result in the more QoS streams for clients, the possibility of failures in back-end nodes is proportionally increased. The failure causes not only the stop of all streaming service but also the loss of the current playing positions. In this paper, when a back-end node becomes a failed state, the recovery mechanisms are studied to support the unceasing streaming service. For the actual VOD service environment, we implement a cluster-based VOD servers composed of general PCs and adopt the parallel processing for MPEG movies. From the implemented VOD server, a video block recovery mechanism is designed on parity algorithms. However, without considering the architecture of cluster-based VOD server, the application of the basic technique causes the performance bottleneck of the internal network for recovery and also results in the inefficiency CPU usage of back-end nodes. To address these problems, we propose a new failure recovery mechanism based on the pipeline computing concept.