Tiger Paper Review

Tiger provides digital video to large-scale networks of viewers and players.
Each file is striped across all machines in the network which are
themselves interconnected by a switched network. The system uses a schedule
to avoid overloading any player in the network due to short term high demand
from viewers. The system simply delay a viewer if it detected insufficient
bandwidth required for the request on any machine.

The distributed schedule management is a nice idea, in that it is solving
the big problem of scalability by just maintaining local consistent views of
the global schedule and rotating it around the ring of hosts; and this trick
is enough in real situations (with reasonable load overhead during short
period of time).

The Tiger system, in its single bit-rate version, assumes homogeneity among
hosts; since it sets the length for playing a block of video (for any host)
to be the same for all hosts. This assumption, although simplifying the
schedule management, will reduce the efficiency of playing videos by not
using the maximum throughput of the powerful hosts.
Received on Thu Dec 01 2005 - 11:16:27 EST