The Improved Maximum Urgency First scheduling policy

Stream merging techniques utilize multicast to minimize the server resource consumption. However, how waiting requests are scheduled for service in the context of stream merging has not been studied extensively. The improved maximum urgency first (IMUF) scheduling algorithm for video servers applying stream merging is proposed. IMUF considers multiple attributes of the video waiting queue. Three heuristic implementation schemes are presented: IMUF-I, IMUF-P and IMUF-M. The proposed implementations are compared and evaluated through extensive simulation. Results show that IMUF can yield significant performance benefits in terms of defection rates, average access delay and fairness.