Workload of a Media-Enhanced Classroom Server

Analysis of educational media server workloads

“…Figure 1(b) shows that a majority (i.e., 70%) of BIBS requests for stored content are for 50-55 minute videos, similar to previously studied education server workloads that contain stored content from classroom lectures [14,17].…”

“…For BIBS, 80% of the requests and more than 95% of the minutes delivered are for videos encoded at 350-500 kb/s. These rates are considerably higher than the rates observed in previous streaming workload studies [1,9,12,14,17].…”

“…Figure 1(a) shows that eTeach has higher variability in stored and requested file sizes than education media servers previously studied [14,17], with 25-30% of requests to short videos (i.e., under 5 minutes) and other requests approximately evenly distributed to videos of duration 5-10, 10-15, 15-20, 20-25 and 30-35 minutes. Figure 1(b) shows that a majority (i.e., 70%) of BIBS requests for stored content are for 50-55 minute videos, similar to previously studied education server workloads that contain stored content from classroom lectures [14,17].…”

“…Recent studies of client access to MANIC system audio content [17], low-bitrate videos in the Classroom2000 system [14], a mix of education and entertainment videos in the mMod system [1], and education content on an internal server of a large international corporation [12] have provided data on particular aspects of those media server workloads (e.g., example daily variation in server load, distribution of media stream or session durations, relative frequency of various types of interactive requests), and have pointed out that access patterns for educational media may be different than for entertainment media [1].…”

“…Both servers contain higher quality videos than servers or client workloads previously analyzed [1,9,12,14,17]. The eTeach system [21] was introduced in September 2000 to deliver the lectures and laboratory demos for a computer science course with an enrollment of 280 students.…”