<title>Storage server requirements for delivery of hypermedia documents</title>

Abstract

Current approaches for continuous media (CM) file systems focus on scheduling requirements for sessions consisting of single video or audio streams. This paper examines the multimedia delivery problem from the perspective of hypermedia document servers. Such hypermedia documents can be characterized as a web of nodes, each node containing a set of time-dependent CM and discrete media objects. We first look at a hypothetical user's view of a hypermedia session. We then present two service models, the CM service model and the hypermedia service model, and compare them.We propose a new view of session, a hypermedia session, suitable for scheduling the delivery of hypermedia documents, and present sample scheduling algorithms. This notion of hypermedia session is examined from the standpoint of resource management at the orchestration layer of distributed MM system.

Run-time optimization of heterogeneous media access in a multimedia server

“…In particular, upcoming multimedia formats such as HyTime [5] and MHEG [6] combines related CM and DM information in temporal and hyperlinked compositions. Hypermedia (HM), a superset of CM, are hypergraph-structured programmes that consist of video branches, as well as loosely time-tied DM data, separated by user-interaction nodes [7], [8]. As a multimedia user navigates, the data requested may switch frequently between DM and CM.…”

“…In each round of service, a server provides one refill service to each CM stream [1]- [4]. DM data requests can only be serviced during times at which a server can safely pause real-time stream services [1], [7], [9], [10]. However, a server fully engaged in precommitted CM data delivery may not be able to yield substantial time to serve pending DM data requests.…”