Buffer Sharing Schemes for Continuous-Media Systems

Buffer management in continuous-media systems is a frequently studied topic. One of the most interesting recent proposals is the idea of buffer sharing for concurrent streams. As analyzed in [8], by taking advantage of the temporal behaviour of concurrent streams, buffer sharing can lead to a 50% savings in total buffer space. In this paper, we study how to actually implement buffer sharing. To this end, we develop the CES Buffer Sharing scheme that is very efficient to implement, and that permits savings asymptotically very close to the ideal savings predicted by the analysis in [8]. We show that the CES scheme can operate effectively under varying degrees of disk utilizations, and during transition periods when the number of concurrent streams changes. We also demonstrate how the scheme can be further improved, particularly for situations when the number of concurrent streams is small. In ongoing work, we will integrate the proposed scheme into a distributed continuous-media file system which is under development at the University of British Columbia.