Normal Pipelining

Abstract

Multimedia objects can be stored on tertiary storage devices to provide large storage capacity at low cost. The staging method retrieves the whole objects to the staging buffers prior to consumption. Thus, the start-up latency is high. The time slice method being described in the last chapter reduces the start-up latency only when the tertiary storage bandwidth is higher than double of the displaying data rate of the object. However, if the tertiary storage bandwidth is below double of the data consumption rate of the object, then we can only stage the object prior to using it. The pipelining methods aim at minimizing the start-up latency when the tertiary storage bandwidth is not higher than the data consumption rate of the objects. The pipelining methods are used to reduce the start-up latency and staging buffer size. In the normal pipelining method, the sizes of the slices are minimized to maximize the overlapping between the displaying time and the retrieval time of the slices. In the space efficient pipelining methods, the buffer size in accessing the slices is minimized. In the segmented pipelining method, the latency in serving interactive requests is reduced. The normal pipelining method is described in this chapter. The space efficient pipelining method and the segmented pipelining method are presented in the following two chapters. We shall describe the objective of the normal pipelining method. Then, the bounds on the sizes of the slices are shown. After that, the start-up latency and the minimum size of the first slice are shown. The reduction in the startup latency using the normal pipelining method is presented.