A performance study of broadcast information delivery systems

The authors consider a videotex system architecture where user requests are processed by a service computer, and the requested information pages are broadcast to all users. Due to the large volume of information that is typically available, a secondary storage device, such as a disk, is used to hold the database. However, a small fraction of the information pages may be kept in main memory. A detailed simulation model is used to study the performance of this system architecture. Features such as scheduling page broadcasts, memory management, and disk scheduling are represented explicitly in the model. Simulation results are presented to show the response-time performance of various memory-management and disk scheduling strategies.<>