Analysis of educational media server workloads

Abstract

This paper presents an extensive analysis of the client workloads for educational media servers at two major U.S. universities. The goals of the analysis include providing data for generating synthetic workloads, gaining insight into the design of streaming content distribution networks, and quantifying how much server bandwidth can be saved in interactive educational environments by using recently developed multicast streaming methods for stored content.

DISC: Dynamic Interleaved Segment Caching for Interactive Streaming

“…This trend has been observed previously in both the educational environment and in the entertainment environment (see e.g. [1,6,13]). …”

“…A number of studies are focused on workload characterization of client interactive requests to the rapidly increased Internet streaming media contents. The client interaction patterns are studied for frequencies of different types of client interactions and distributions of session on and off times for MANIC audio content system [19], the educational eTech and BIBS media servers [1], and the educational internal server of a large international corporation [13]. Study [1] also presents the session arrival process and proposes caching strategies for interactive workloads.…”

Analytical Model of On-Demand Streaming Services Based on Renewal Reward Theory

“…The arrival of requests is assumed to be a Poisson process with the rate λ . Although this assumption is a mathematical convention, there is a research that we can observe Poisson arrival at the multimedia server in some cases [11].…”

Analyzing Student Viewing Patterns in Lecture Videos

“…Earlier work in this area has shown, e.g., that the first five minutes of a video are most heavily accessed, or that a peak in access occurs around the exam dates [1]. A large amount of existing work (such as [2], [3]) focuses on technical issues with the goal of modeling workload of the media servers. However, to our knowledge, no prior work analyzes viewing patterns from an educational perspective.…”