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In recent year, the design of mass storage servers for
video-on-demand (VOD) has become an active research topic.
One of the major issues for designing VOD servers is how
to provide real-time and high data retrieval bandwidth.
In this thesis, we propose an extended data placement and
retrieval scheme to handle video files stored in the MPEG-2
format, in which the stored video files can have a wide
range of playback bit rates. This scheme is based on a
general two-level disk array architecture and the tight
upper bound of the lumped disk seek time. It achieves
effective utilization of disk bandwidth.
Another issue addressed in this thesis is the support of
interactive operations such as fast forward and backward
searches. This thesis employs a scheme which can provide
smooth visual impact and achieve VCR-like feeling. An
queueing model is developed in this thesis to determine the I/O
bandwidth requirement to achieve a certain level of quality
of service (QoS). The proposed queueing model provides a
complete analysis tool for pinning down the resource
requirement issue and is verified through simulation for
its validity.
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