High performance data broadcasting: A comprehensive systemsí perspective

Abstract

Broadcast scheduling algorithms have received a lot of attention recently, since they are important for supporting mobile/ubiquitous computing. However, a comprehensive system’s perspective towards the development of high performance broadcast servers is very much lacking. With this paper we attempt to fill this gap. We contribute four novel scheduling algorithms that ensure the proper interplay between broadcast and disk scheduling in order to attain high performance. We study comprehensively the performance of the broadcast server, as it consists of the broadcast scheduling and the disk scheduling, algorithms. Our results show that the contributed algorithms outperform the algorithms, which currently define the state of the art. Furthermore, one of our algorithms is shown to enjoy considerably higher performance, under all values of the problem and system parameters (such as the skew of access distributions, the system load, the data object sizes, cache- and disk-intensive workloads, etc.). An important conclusion of this study is that broadcast scheduling algorithms have only a small effect on the overall broadcast system performance, a fact that necessitates the refocusing of related research.