Arrangement of multi-dimensional scalable video data for heterogeneous clients

A scalable video server extracts data corresponding to the resolution requested by its client from the total data containing the information encoding a full resolution video. Depending on the requested resolution, the extracted data may not be contiguously placed on a disk or a disk array. For this reason, the traverse distance, which indicates the difference between the first read position and the last read position, can be much larger than the amount of the requested data. This causes additional rotational latency in a disk and thus degrades disk performance. Furthermore, scalable video data more seriously deteriorates the independency of disks in a disk array. That is, even a small read request can be split into multiple disk requests across disks of a disk array, because the requested data are scattered across multiple disks. To address these problems, we propose new data arrangement schemes for scalable video data. In these new schemes, we first deal with the arrangement of multi-dimensional scalable video data, which can be employed regardless of the number of scalability dimensions. Second, we improve disk performance by reducing average disk cost, which is based on both the traverse distance of each disk and the independency of disks. Third, we improve overall performance of disk devices through considering the entire request pattern, when large numbers of clients concurrently demand heterogeneous resolutions of videos from a server. We also propose fast arrangement algorithms to reduce the computation time required for searching an effective arrangement so that they can be easily applied to practical server system.