We propose a hardware design which provides support for smoothed transmission of stored video from a server to a client for
real-time playback. The design, called Streamer, resides on the network interface and handles the transmission scheduling
of all streams over a single link connected to an ATM network. Streamer minimizes the interaction needed with the server CPU,
while supporting very fine grain scheduling of cell transmissions for a large number of streams. Throughput is also maximized
by streaming data directly from the storage medium to the network interface buffer over the I/O bus. We observe that the scheduling
mechanism can be modified to operate at 2.1 Gbps link speeds and the Streamer as a whole can provide cell-granular, interleaved
scheduling with full utilization of 155 Mbps and 622 Mbps links.
The work reported in this paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant MIP-9203895. Any opinions,
findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the view of the NSF.