Real-Time Disk Scheduling for Multimedia Data Retrieval

Abstract

The great progresses in computer and network technologies make applications of distributed multimedia ever more popular. Various commercial products have been presented in these years such as electronic commerce, video-on-demand, teleconferencing, tele-medicine, distance education and digital library. The basic architecture of a distributed multimedia system contains three parts—the server subsystem, the network subsystem and the client subsystem, as shown in Figure 1 (Chang, et al., 1997; Chang, 1996; Gemmell and Han, 1994; Rangan and Vin, 1993). Server subsystem: Media data are stored in the storage devices of server subsystem, such as hard disks and CD-ROM, by data placement schemes (Wang, et al., 1997; Lougher and Shepherd, 1993; Vin and Rangan, 1991). When user requests are presented, media data must be retrieved from storage devices to system buffer under pre-specified timing requirements (Tindell and Burns, 1994).