Media allocation methods to improve multimedia query and access reliability

Distributed Multimedia Database Systems (DMDB) have gained in popularity for today's database system design due to their fault-tolerance, resource-sharing capacity, and reliable performance. Reliability performance is an important issue in DMDB design. The reliability of a DMDB depends on the reliability of its communication links and nodes as well as the distribution of its resources, such as various media. The distribution of media is an important factor that affects the multimedia query and access reliability (MQAR). The reliability-oriented media assignment problem is to find a media distribution such that the MQAR is maximal. In this paper, we attempt to develop a reliability model and algorithms to achieve reliability-oriented media allocation.