Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments

Topic: Scheduling Techniques for Broadcasting Popular Media

Date: Monday, May 24, 2004

Time: 1:00 P.M. – 2:00 P.M.

Room: Steinman Hall, Room T-512

Speaker: Dr. Amotz Bar-Noy, Brooklyn College -- CUNY

Abstract

A media-on-demand (MoD) system is a distributed network system in which servers respond to requests by clients to receive (playback, view, listen, or read) various types of media. Most current MoD systems use unicast, in which each client receives a dedicated transmission from a server. This solution cannot scale up well for popular media that may have hundreds of thousands of requests over a short period of time. With highly popular media, a server can become overloaded, causing denial of service or large delays. For popular media, broadcasting is the ultimate scalable solution. This talk describes new broadcasting schemes for highly loaded MoD systems. These schemes exploit new technologies, that already exist or are expected to be available in the near future, such as the multicast capabilities of the Internet, high receiving bandwidth for clients, and fast, cheap, storage capacity for clients. Given these new technologies, the challenge is to find the best way to! schedule the media on the multicast channels to provide the best quality of service. The schemes are based on a new abstract model of the broadcasting system that reflects new technologies. In addition, it mathematically models the various QoS parameters and it can handle different data-types. For a given bandwidth, these broadcasting schemes guarantee the minimum possible start-up delay time for an uninterrupted playback. The results improve the best known asymptotic results and outperform known results for practical parameters of the system.

Joint work with: Richard Ladner and Tami Tamir from University of Washington.

Amotz Bar-Noy received the B.Sc. degree in 1981 in Mathematics and Computer Science and the Ph.D. degree in 1987 in Computer Science, both from the Hebrew University, Israel. From October 1987 to September 1989 he was a post-doc fellow at Stanford University, California. From October 1989 to August 1996 he was a Research Staff Member with IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York. From February 1995 to September 2001 he was an associate Professor with the Electrical Engineering - Systems department of Tel Aviv University, Israel. From September 1999 to December 2001 he was with AT\&T research labs in New Jersey. Since February 2002 he is a Professor with the Computer and Information Science Department of Brooklyn College - CUNY, Brooklyn New York.