A PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF AN OBJECT-BASED I O ARCHITECTURE IN A VIDEOSERVER ENVIRONMENT/

In this paper, we present a performance analysis of how effective vide o server applications can be supported on personal computers (PCs) con nected through a local area network (LAN). We considered both the stan dard 16-Mbit/s token ring and a 100-Mbit/s token ring, which follows c losely the specifications for the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FD DI). We examined three I/O architectures for a PC-based video server: an interrupt-driven I/O architecture, a peer-to-peer I/O architecture, and a concurrent, object-based I/O architecture that we proposed. The video server must support multiple MPEG-1 video streams at the same t ime to multiple clients on the LAN. We found that the network protocol layers require a lot of processing power, and that an implementation of our proposed I/O architecture, which takes advantage of the availab le power of the host processor to off-load I/O adapters, can deliver m uch better performance, and is more cost-effective, than other I/O arc hitectures in a video server environment.