Scalable multimedia disk scheduling

A new multimedia disk-scheduling algorithm, termed Cascaded-SFC, is presented. The Cascaded-SFC multimedia disk scheduler is applicable in environments where multimedia data requests arrive with different quality of service (QoS) requirements such as real-time deadline and user priority. Previous work on disk scheduling has focused on optimizing the seek times and/or meeting the real-time deadlines. The Cascaded-SFC disk scheduler provides a unified framework for multimedia disk scheduling that scales with the number of scheduling parameters. The general idea is based on modeling the multimedia disk requests as points in multiple multidimensional subspaces, where each of the dimensions represents one of the parameters (e.g., one dimension represents the request deadline, another represents the disk cylinder number, and a third dimension represents the priority of the request, etc.). Each multidimensional subspace represents a subset of the QoS parameters that share some common scheduling characteristics. Then the multimedia disk scheduling problem reduces to the problem of finding a linear order to traverse the multidimensional points in each subspace. Multiple space-filling curves are selected to fit the scheduling needs of the QoS parameters in each subspace. The orders in each subspace are integrated in a cascaded way to provide a total order for the whole space. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the Cascaded-SFC disk scheduling algorithm over other disk schedulers.