© 2000 by British Computer Society
Dynamic Round-based Resource Management for On-demand Multimedia Servers
1 Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of China 2 Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsuing, Taiwan, Republic of China Email: cchen@mail.nsysu.edu.tw
While multimedia servers become increasingly important, resource management is essential to performance and quality guarantees. In most multimedia servers, each user request is treated independently. However, in some applications, such as training centers or entertainment renting stores, a user may request a sequence of multimedia data retrievals for viewing a series of lecture representations or entertainment song plays. Hence, a user's interaction with such a server, called a session, consists of a sequence of variable length multimedia data access requests. In this paper, we call each such access request, within a session, a round. Each round has its own QoS requirements, and the start and finish times might not be coincident with another user's.
Most dynamic resource allocation algorithms reassign resources to all the users only at the same fixed periods, which might not perform well on the systems described above. Hence, we propose a dynamic round-based resource management utilizing the characteristics of sessions and rounds. We develop an admission control algorithm for accepting new users (sessions) and a dynamic resource assignment algorithm that performs at the start of each round, instead of at fixed periods. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms perform better than conventional methods.
Received 7 August, 1998. Revised 23 May, 2000.