<title>Design and implementation of the Stony Brook video server</title>

Abstract

With the advent of multimedia computing, there is an emerging need for systems that can support digital continuous media without requiring special adaptation logic on the part of application programs and that can be implemented on existing network infrastructures. In this paper the system architecture of the Stony Brook video server (SBVS) is described. To guarantee real-time end-to-end performance, SBVS uses a real-time network access protocol, RETHER, that uses existing Ethernet hardware. SBVS tightly integrates the bandwidth guarantee mechanisms between network transport and disk I/O. SBVS's stream-by-stream disk scheduling scheme optimizes the effective disk bandwidth without incurring scheduling overhead every cycle. In addition, SBVS implements multi-resolution video coding to reduce network and I/O bandwidth demands in normal viewing mode, while supporting fast forward/backward without requiring extra bandwidth. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, we have implemented the first prototype, SBVS-1, which can support five concurrent video streams on an EISA PC. To our knowledge, this is the first video server that provides an end-to-end performance guarantee from the server's disks to each user's display over standard Ethernet. In this paper, we describe the implementation details of integrating network and I/O bandwidth guarantee mechanisms, and the performance measurements that drive and/or validate our design decisions.