Design and analysis of video-on-demand servers

In this paper we deal with the design and analysis of a typical multimedia server, video-on-demand server (VoD). If we define the performance measure of the VoD server as the maximum number of concurrent access processes it can support, the system performance depends on a number of the system characteristics. They are: (i) storage devices contention; (ii) resource allocation, such as buffer size; (iii) QoS control. Thus, in order to achieve the best performance of a server the design trade-off among theses factors should be investigated quantitatively. In this paper we formulate and solve a problem of allocating resources for such a multimedia server in order to maximize concurrent video accesses under QoS guarantees. The solution is theoretically based on economic models and queuing theory. By using our optimization procedure we may estimate the maximum number of concurrent video accesses with optimal buffer allocation and QoS guarantees