Minimizing buffer requirements in Video-On-Demand servers

Memory management is a key issue when designing cost-effective video-on-demand servers. State-of-the-al? techniques, like double-buffering, allocate buffers in a per-stream basis and require huge amounts of memory. In this paper, we propose a buffering policy, namely Single Pair of Buffers, that reduces dramatically server memory requirements by reserving a pair of buffers per storage device. By considering in detail disk and network interaction we have also identified the particular conditions under which this policy can be successfully applied to engineer Video-On-Demand servers. Reduction factors of two orders of magnitude compared to the double-buffering approach can be obtained. Current disk and network parameters make this technique feasible.