Disk-aware data Management for Interactive Media Services

Interactive media has recently gained a lot of interest. Interactivity gives viewers VCR controls like slow-motion, pause, fast-forward, and instant replay. Traditional server-based or client-based approaches for supporting interactivity either consume too much network bandwidth or require large client buffering; and hence they are economically unattractive. In this paper, we propose iCS (an interactive client/server architecture), which acts as a router that transforms non-interactive broadcast or multicast streams into interactive ones for servicing a large number of end users. For iCS to work cost effectively, it must carefully manage its storage devices, which are needed for caching voluminous media data. In this regard, we propose a disk-aware data management strategy consisting of three complementary components: disk profiler, data placement, and IO scheduler. Through quantitative analysis and experiments, we show that these disk-aware strategies considerably improve device throughput under various workload scenarios.