Flexible disk scheduling for multimedia presentation servers

Objects composing a multimedia presentation need to be delivered based on the temporal relationships specified by the author or authors. Depending on the composition of multimedia presentations, disk access for retrieval may not be needed in every round. A presentation can skip a certain number of disk scheduling rounds before retrieving the next required chunk of data. In this paper, we present a min-max skip round disk access algorithm for the retrieval of multimedia presentations in a flexible manner depending on the presentation composition, client/server buffer, and server-disk/network bandwidths. The proposed min-max skip round disk scheduling algorithm can be used for push, pull, as well as hybrid approaches for delivering multimedia presentations. We consider storage of presentations on an array of disks as well as on multi-zone recording disks. A few simulation results are provided.