Urgency-Based Batching Policy for Streaming Media

Batching has been shown to be very effective in reducing the demand on server and network bandwidth in streaming media applications. A new batching policy, called the Maximum Urgency First (MUF), is proposed. MUF schedules the video queue with the maximum urgency whenever a server channel becomes available. The definition of urgency considers multiple attributes of the waiting queue. Three heuristic MUF implementations are presented: MUF-I, MUF-P and MUF-M. We compare the proposed MUF schemes with the maximum factored queue length (MFQL) batching policy through extensive simulation and show that the proposed MUF policy can yield excellent performance benefits in terms of defection rates, average access delay, and unfairness.