On the design of a low-cost video-on-demand storage system
Banu Özden1 
, Rajeev Rastogi1 and Avi Silberschatz1
| (1) |
AT&T Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, 07974-0636 Murray Hill, NJ, USA |
Abstract Recent advances in storage technology, coupled with the dramatic increase in the bandwidth of networks, now make it possible
to provide “video-on-demand” service to viewers. A video-on-demand server is a computer system that stores videos in compressed
digital form and provides support for various portions of compressed video data to be accessed and transmitted concurrently.
We present a low-cost storage architecture for a video-on-demand server that relies principally on disks. The high bandwidths
of disks in conjunction with a clever strategy for striping videos on them enables simultaneous access and transmission of
portions of a video, separated by fixed time intervals. We also present schemes for implementing VCR-like functions including
fast forward, rewind, and pause, and extend our schemes to the case in which videos have different rate requirements.
Key words Video-on-demand service - video storage on disk - VCR control operations
Rajeev Rastogi is a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he works in the areas of database systems and file systems.
His technical interests include high-performance transaction processing, fault-tolerant storage managers, and multimedia file
systems. He received his B Tech degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay in 1988, and
his MS and PhD in Computer Science (1990 and 1993, respectively) from the University of Texas at Austin.
Banu Özden has been a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories since 1 May 1995. She works in the areas of storage systems
and multimedia computing. She received her BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the Istanbul Technical University in Turkey,
and her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
Abraham Silberschatz is an endowed Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the
area of concurrent processing. His research interests include operating systems, database systems, and distributed systems.
He received his PhD in Computer Science from the State University at New York, Stony Brook, in 1976. He is a recipient of
the IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper Award for the article “Capability Manager“, which appeared in IEEE Transactions
on Software Engineering. He is the co-author of two well-known textbooks — Operating System Concepts and Database System Concepts. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.
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