Modelling Mixed Access-Patterns in Network-Based Systems

The usage of network-based applications is increasing, as network speeds increase. Also, the use of streaming applications, e.g BBC I-Player, Youtube etc, over the network is becoming commonplace. These applications access data sequentially. However, as processor speed and the amount of memory available increase, the rate at which streaming applications access data is much faster than the rate at which the blocks can be fetched consecutively from the network storage. In addition to sequential access, the system also needs to satisfy demand misses. Therefore, there is a need to model these access patterns for network-based storage systems.In this paper, we attempt to develop an analytical model and an algorithm which will be used to investigate the operational boundaries under which streaming applications can run without jitter and demand misses can be satisfied in reasonable time.