Disk Scheduling for Multimedia Database Applications

A special aspect of multimedia database applications is that they require continuity in their data access. The maximum number of users who can simultaneously use the multimedia database is limited by this continuity requirement. Formulas for computing the maximum number of users and the associated memory requirement have been presented in the literature. However, these formulas do not take into account the disk scheduling algorithm used by the multimedia server. In this paper, we analyze the eeect of this factor and show that practical disk scheduling algorithms drastically reduce the amount of memory required to support the continuity constraint. A simulation-based study is used to connrm these eeects and to highlight the performance characteristics for various types of media.