SMDP: minimizing buffer requirements for continuous media servers

摘要

Excessive buffer requirement to handle continuous-media playbacks is an impediment to cost- effective provisioning for on-line video retrieval. Given the skewed distribution of video popularity, it is expected that often there are concurrent playbacks of the same video file within a short time interval. This creates an opportunity to batch multiple requests and to service them with a single stream form the disk without violating the on-demand con- straint.