DYNAMIC BATCHING POLICIES FOR AN ON-DEMAND VIDEO SERVER

In a video-on-demand environment, continuous delivery of video streams to the clients is guaranteed by sufficient reserved network and serve r resources. This leads to a hard limit on the number of streams that a video server can deliver. Multiple client requests for the same vide o can be served with a single disk I/O stream by sending (multi castin g) the same data blocks to multiple clients (with the multicast facili ty, if present in the system). This is achieved by batching (grouping) requests for the same video that arrive within a short time. We explo re the role of customer-waiting time and reneging behavior in selectin g the video to be multicast. We show that a first come, first served ( FCFS) policy that schedules the video with the longest outstanding req uest can perform better than the maximum queue length (MQL) policy tha t chooses the video with the maximum number of outstanding requests. A dditionally, multicasting is better exploited by scheduling playback o f the n most popular videos at predetermined, regular intervals (hence , termed FCFS-n). If user reneging can be reduced by guaranteeing that a maximum waiting time will not be exceeded, then performance of FCFS -n is further improved by selecting the regular playback intervals as this maximum waiting time. For an empirical workload, we demonstrate a substantial reduction (of the order of 60%) in the required server ca pacity by batching.