Playback dispatch and fault recovery for a clustered video system with multiple servers

Abstract

Recent technology advances have made multimedia on-demand services feasible. One of the challenges is to provide fault-tolerant capability at system level for a practical video-on-demand system. The main concern on providing fault recovery is to minimize the consumption of system resources on the surviving servers in the event of server failure. In order to reduce the overhead on recovery, we present three schemes for recovering faulty playbacks through channel merging and sharing techniques on the surviving servers. Furthermore, to evenly distribute the recovery load among the surviving servers, we propose a balanced dispatch policy that ensures load balancing in both the normal server conditions and the presence of a server failure.