A simulated annealing approach for multimedia data placement

Abstract

Multimedia applications are characterized by their strong timing requirements and constraints and thus multimedia data storage is a critical issue in the overall system's performance and functionality. This paper describes multimedia data representation models that effectively guide data placement towards the improvement of the Quality of Presentation for the considered multimedia applications. The performance of both constructive placement and iterative improvement placement algorithms is evaluated and discussed. Emphasis is given on placement schemes which are based on the simulated annealing optimization algorithm. A placement policy, based on a self-improving version of the simulated annealing (SISA) algorithm is applied and evaluated. Performance of the placement policies is experimentally evaluated on a simulated tertiary storage subsystem. As proven by the experimentation, the proposed approach shows considerable gain in terms of seek and service times. The improvements of the proposed SISA approach are in the range of 40% when compared to random placement and at the range of 15–35% when compared to the typical simulated annealing algorithm, depending a lot on the initial configuration and the neighborhood search.