Design of Clustered Streaming Servers to Balance the Network Load for VoD Applications

摘要

Ideally, video and audio are streamed across the Internet from the server to the client in response to a client request for a Web page containing embedded videos. The client plays the incoming multimedia stream in real time as the data is received. Quite a few video streamers are starting to appear and many pseudo-streaming technologies and other potential solutions are also in the pipeline. Generally streaming video solutions may work on a closed-loop intranet, but for mass-market Internet use, they're simply dysfunctional. However current transport protocol, codec and scalability research will eventually make video on the Web a practical reality. The basic goal of this paper is the same of developing and stream video and audio servers which will provides its client media data on a real time basis and balance the load in the cluster of servers. Video transmission requires relatively high bandwidth with strict Quality of Service (QoS) properties (e.g., guaranteed bandwidth, bounded jitter and delays). Therefore, as any application involving video transmission, our service is best provided using QoS reservation mechanisms. However, if bandwidth is abundant and jitter rarely occurs, e.g., in a relatively not loaded LAN or small scale WAN, and then some buffer space and a flow control mechanism can account for jitter period.