A continuous stream service and high service availability mechanism for continuous media servers

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet, stream services are becoming more popular. The large media servers supporting thousands of concurrent media streams have to satisfy us with both good throughout and high availability. Although they are reciprocal from the viewpoint of system performance, the stream service continuity, as well as throughput, should be considered in clustered media servers. This is because media stream services should be continuously available to the clients even on the event of system failure. In this paper, we introduce service availability as the gauge of service degree on media servers, and present the basic scheme for guaranteeing continuous stream service. To do this, we propose LSS(Log Stream Status) and RRD(Ready Resource for instant Delivery) mechanisms. They are classified according to the status management method of stream service and the resumption method of closed service. Although these mechanisms require additional overhead, we found that they can be applied to clustered media servers with minimum overhead. Additionally, we concluded that they can provide higher quality of service availability on traditional clustered media servers.