A network co-processor-based approach to scalable media streaming in servers

Abstract

This paper presents the embedded construction and experimental results for a media scheduler on i960 RD equipped I20 Network Interfaces (NI) used for streaming. We utilize the Distributed Virtual Communication Machine (DVCM) infrastructure developed by us which allows run-time extensions to provide scheduling for streams that may require it. The scheduling overhead of such a scheduler is ≈65 μs with the ability to stream MPEG video to remote clients at requested rates. Moreover, placement of scheduler action 'close' to the network on the Network Interface (NI) allows tighter coupling of computation and communication, eliminating traffic from the host bus and memory subsystem, allowing increased host CPU utilization for other tasks without being affected by host-CPU loading. Architectures to build scalable media scheduling servers are explored-by distributing media schedulers and media stream producers among NIs within a server and clustering a number of such servers using commodity hardware and software.