PUSH THE BOTTLENECK OF STREAMING MEDIA SYSTEM FROM STREAMING MEDIA SERVER TO NETWORK

Streaming media is pervasive on the Internet now and it continues to grow rapidly. Most streaming media systems have adopted a typical system architecture in which the storage devices are attached privately to the streaming media server. Unfortunately, with the steady growth of Internet subscribers, the streaming media server quickly becomes a system bottleneck. This paper proposes an innovative, high performance streaming media system architecture (HPSMS) based on the logical separation in the streaming media transport protocol. The architecture avoids expensive store-and-forward data copying between the streaming media server and storage devices. The most salient feature of HPSMS is that the architecture eliminates the streaming media server bottleneck, while dynamically increasing system bandwidth with the expansion of storage system capacity. The system performance of the proposed HPSMS is evaluated through a prototype implementation.