Playback dispatch and fault recovery for a clustered video system with multiple servers

Recent technology advances have made multimedia on-demand services feasible . One of the challenges is to provide fault-tolerant capability at system l evel for a practical video-on-demand system. The main concern on providing fault recovery is to minimize the consumption of system resources on the su rviving servers in the event of server failure. In order to reduce the over head on recovery, we present three schemes for recovering faulty playbacks through channel merging and sharing techniques on the surviving servers. Fu rthermore, to evenly distribute the recovery load among the surviving serve rs, we propose a balanced dispatch policy that ensures load balancing in bo th the normal server conditions and the presence of a server failure.