Adaptive Real-Time Monitoring Mechanism for Replicated Distributed Video Player Systems

One of the main problems to ensure the quality of services (QoS) in video playback in a replicated distributed video player system is how to adapt to the changing network traffic condition and the workload at the video servers. In this paper, we propose a mechanism, called adaptive real-time monitoring, to solve the problem. The proposed mechanism consists of three steps: selection, monitoring and switching. In the selection step, the mechanism will determine which video server to serve the client by considering the factors of the current network traffic and workload at the servers. In the monitoring step, the QoS of the video playback will be monitored closely. A feedback mechanism is adopted to improve the QoS of video playback by adjusting the allocation of resources at the video server. The switching mechanism will be invoked when the QoS of the video display is too worse that it must switch to another video server.