Design and Implementation of the Stony Brook Video Server

The system architecture of the Stony Brook Video Server (SBVS), which guarantees end-to-end real-time video playback in a client-server setting, is presented. SBVS employs a real-time network access protocol, RETHER, to use existing Ethernet hardware as the underlying communications media. The video server tightly integrates the bandwidth guarantee mechanisms for network transport and disk I/O. SBVS's stream-by-stream disk scheduling scheme optimizes the effective disk bandwidth without incurring significant scheduling overhead. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, we have implemented a prototype called SBVS-1, which can support five concurrent MPEG-1 video streams on an Intel 486DX2/EISA PC. To our knowledge, this system is the first video server that provides an end-to-end performance guarantee from the server's disks to the each user's display over standard Ethernet. This paper describes the implementation details of integrating network and I/O bandwidth guarantee mechanisms, and the performance measurements that drive and/or validate our design decisions. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.