Network Bandwidth Allocation and Admission Control for a Continuous Media File Server

Resource reservation is required to guarantee delivery of continuous media data from a server across a network for continuous playback by a client. This paper addresses the characterization of the network bandwidth requirements of Variable Bit Rate data streams and the corresponding admission control mechanism at the server. We show that a characterization which sends data early, making intelligent use of client buuer space, reduces the amount of network bandwidth reserved per stream without creating any start-up latency. The results of performance experiments in a Continuous Media File Server nd that operation with requests arriving over time can deliver up to 90% of the network bandwidth. The experiments also show that a system designer can conngure a server so that the network and disk bandwidth can scale together.