Design and Analysis of a Real-Time Storage Server for Multimedia Applications using Disk Arrays

This paper designs a real-time storage server (RTSS) for remote multimedia playback applications. The design goal is to maximize the number of clients which can be serviced simultaneously. RTSS must, however, maintain the continuity of each medium. To satisfy both the design goal and the constraint, we propose a new scheduling scheme called round scheduling to eeectively retrieve multimedia disk blocks. The round scheduling is shown to minimize disk idle time. We also present SCAN-like disk arm scheduling that optimizes seek time to access multimedia blocks. Disk architecture for our server adopts a disk array, where data blocks are striped across all the disks.