Disk I/O mixed scheduling strategy for VoD servers

Disk I/O scheduling is one of the key issues in designing Video-on-Demand (VoD) servers. For mixed media data requests, disk I/O scheduling algorithms have to satisfy three performance goals: 1) video streams must be continuously played back, so we must guarantee the real-time retrieval of video streams from storage disks; 2) VoD servers save not only video data, but discrete data (non real-time data), so we have to best-effort reduce response time of retrieving non real-time data from storage disks; 3) pursuing the maximum number of concurrent video streams, so we must optimize disk seeking time to improve disk throughout. This paper puts forward a new Disk I/O Mixed Scheduling (DIOMS) strategy for VoD servers, which reaches above three goals. Experimental results show DIOMS has good performance.