Designing a multiuser HDTV storage server

The authors present a quantitative study of designing a multiuser HDTV server, and they present efficient techniques for storing multiple HDTV videos on disk and servicing multiple subscriber requests simultaneously, both under the constraint of guaranteeing HDTV playback rates. They develop a model that relates disk and device characteristics to the HDTV playback rate and derive a storage pattern for HDTV video streams that guarantees their real-time retrieval. Given multiple HDTV streams, mechanisms for merging their individual storage patterns are developed. Merging algorithms that yield a large improvement in space utilization over storing each of the streams independently are proposed. Policies such as round robin and quality proportional for servicing multiple subscribers simultaneously are studied. These studies provide a quantitative demonstration of the technological feasibility and economic viability of HDTV-on-demand servers on metropolitan area networks (MANs)