Proxy-based failure detection in multimedia streaming environments

This paper presents an effective failure-detection mechanism called the 'dynamic threshold,' which has specifically developed for use with multimedia streaming applications. Compared to the conventional failure-detection methods, which normally use a fixed threshold to detect a server failure, the proposed mechanism detects the failure in an effective and timely manner by using a dynamically adjusted timeout value upon which queries are sent to suspected streaming servers running in a dynamic network environment. The failover mechanism based on the dynamic threshold was implemented in a real streaming environment. The empirical results show that the dynamic threshold mechanism performs better than the conventional method in terms of timeliness, with comparable accuracy. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.