Authors:
Tal Anker,
Gregory V. Chockler,
Idit Keidar,
Michael Rozman and
Jonathan Wexler.
In the proceedings of the IEEE YUFORIC on Multimedia Information
Systems and the 13th International Conference on Advanced Science
and Technology (ICAST97) and the 2nd International Conference
on Multimedia Information Systems (ICMIS97), Motorola
University, Chicago, Illinois, April 5, 1997.
Abstract:
Video on Demand services are popular today in hotels and luxury cruise
boats. Increasing improvement in communication technology, will invite
widespread utilization of VoD services in private homes, provided by
telecommunication companies and via the Internet. In such an
environment, scalability and fault tolerance will be key issues. In
this paper we describe a highly available distributed Video on Demand
(VoD) service, which is inherently scalable and fault tolerant. The
VoD service is provided by multiple servers, that may reside in
different sites. When a server crashes (or disconnects from its
clients), it is replaced by another server in a transparent way; the
clients are unaware of the change in the service provider.
The VoD service exploits the Transis group communication system.
Transis assists in achieving fault tolerance, and greatly simplifies
the overall service design. Furthermore, the fault tolerance is
achieved practically for free: it consumes negligible bandwidth,
storage space, and cpu time.
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