Predictive call admission control for a disk array based video server

With video services featuring in future broadband applications, efficient video server architectures are required. Previous work has shown the efficacy of using large disk arrays for the provision of video to a substantial audience. Recent papers have proposed call-admission control schemes for video servers which utilise the statistics of compressed video and the characteristics of the disk drives themselves. To date, however, the issue of load-balancing has not been addressed. In this paper we supplement prior efforts with the development of a predictive call-admission control scheme which uses the largely deterministic nature of disk array operation to maintain a well-balanced load which in turn reduces the variation of the delay experienced by new requests. We provide derailed results comparing our scheme to others in the literature and show that the predictive scheme gives considerable improvement in terms of both admission delay and interactivity delay.