Adaptability management and deterministic scheduling of media flows on parallel storage servers

We study a new design strategy for the implementation of parallel media servers with a predictable behavior. This strategy makes the timing properties and the quality of presentation of a set of media streams predictable. The proposed strategy provides deterministic guarantees and service reliability for each stream that can't be compromised by server contention. Our real-time scheduling approach exploits the performance of parallel environments and seems a promising method that brings the advantages of parallel computation in media servers. The proposed mechanism provides deterministic service for both constant bit rate (CBR) and variable bit rate (VBR) streams. We present an efficient placement strategy for data frames as well as an adaptability strategy that allows appropriate frames to be dropped without sacrificing the ability to present multimedia applications predictably in time. A prototype implementation of the proposed parallel media server illustrates the concepts of server allocation and scheduling of continuous media streams