Harmonic data placement: file system support for scalable streaming

Scalable encoding scheme enables the player or streaming server to adaptively change the playback rate of multimedia content. However, in scalable streaming of layer encoded content, sequential playback of content does not necessarily coincide with the sequential scan of a file. This property introduces another dimension of complexity in the scheduling of data block retrieval. In this work, we develop a novel file organization strategy, harmonic interleaving, which can effectively handle the dynamically changing playback rate of multimedia data retrieval. The proposed scheme not only eliminates the retrieval of unnecessary blocks but also minimizes disk head movement. Via experiment, harmonic interleaving exhibits superior disk utilization on a moderately loaded network.