Dynamic class-based queue management for scalable media servers

Real time media servers are becoming increasingly important due to the rapid transition of the Internet from text and graphics based applications to multimedia driven environments. In order to meet these ever increasing demands, real time media servers are responsible for supporting a large number of clients with a heterogeneous mix of quality of service (QoS) requirements. The authors propose a dynamic class based queue management scheme that effectively captures the tradeoff between scalability and QoS granularity in a media server. We examine the adaptiveness of the scheme and its integration with the existing schedulers. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through extensive simulation studies.