Authors:
Tal Anker,
Danny Dolev and
Idit Keidar.
In the 19th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
(ICDCS), pages 244-252, Austin, Texas, June 1999.
Abstract:
This paper describes a highly available distributed video on demand
(VoD) service which is inherently fault tolerant. The VoD service is
provided by multiple servers that reside at different sites. New
servers may be brought up ``on the fly'' to alleviate the load on
other servers. When a server crashes it is replaced by another server
in a transparent way; the clients are unaware of the change of service
provider. In test runs of our VoD service prototype, such transitions
are not noticeable to a human observer who uses the service.
Our VoD service uses a sophisticated flow control mechanism and
supports adjustment of the video quality to client capabilities. It
does not assume any proprietary network technology: It uses commodity
hardware and publicly available network technologies (e.g., TCP/IP,
ATM). Our service may run on any machine connected to the
Internet. The service exploits a group communication system as a
building block for high availability. The utilization of group
communication greatly simplifies the service design.
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Last modified: Mon Jul 1 14:32:33 EDT 2002