An Adaptive Scheduling Mechanism for Real-Time Streaming Servers

An innovative dynamic scheduling scheme is proposed to improve the efficiency of video-on-demand servers. We first introduce a paged segment striping model that makes dynamic scheduling possible. Based on this striping scheme, we propose a dynamic scheduling scheme that adapts to frequently changing workloads. In particular, we can change the round length without any additional disk access so that it can be adapted to changing request trends with a negligible cost in performance. This dynamic scheduling scheme always shows better performance than the static scheduling scheme in simulation. Although the dynamical scheme introduces additional scheduling overhead, it is very small when compared with the performance degradation in the static scheme.