The implementation of a multi-server distributed MPEG video system

The development of video on demand systems have evolved from dedicated networks (W. Bolosky et al., 1996) to environments that are open, unpredictable, and with considerable uncertainty in workload and resource requirements (S. Gringeri et al., 1998; R. Reibman and A. Berger, 1993). The key problem is how to achieve predictable system performance without much control on the open and unpredictable network. The idea of feedback control has been utilized successfully in multimedia applications and shown to be effective in real time video streaming applications (J. Bolot and T. Turletti, 1994; C. Cowan et al., T. Hasegawa et al., 1999). The paper is a report on the progress of implementing a distributed MPEG video system with QoS and feedback control. The detailed design and simulation results were reported in previous work (K.Y. Lam et al., 1998; J. Ng et al., 2000; 1998; H.K. Wai and J.K. Ng, 1998). The major contribution of the paper is to present the implementation details on the video servers and the middleware of the video client.