A study on scheduling multiple priority requests in multimedia servers

Multimedia servers store a large amount of media data of different format. Different data objects have different real time requirements. We present an empirical study on the performance of disk scheduling in the presence of different media types with different real time requirements. We also argue that using multiple queues to handle different data types is not the best way to handle objects with different priorities. Moreover we argue that using one queue per disk to organize objects with different real time requirements would be more suitable for multimedia server applications. We built a simulation model based on a real video server, PanaViss, produced by Panasonic. The experiments show that using multiple queues respects the priority hierarchy. However, this schema sometimes penalizes utilization of the disk