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 - 11:17:38 EST
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