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In this work, our aim is to provide finer priority levels in the design of a general-purpose Web multimedia server with provisions of the CM services. The type of services provided include reading/writing a web page, downloading/uploading an audio/video stream, navigating the Web through browsing, and interactive video teleconferencing. The selected priority encoding levels for such operations follow the order of admin read/write, hot page CM and Web multicasting, CM read, Web read, CM write and Web write. Hot pages are the most requested CM streams (e.g., the newest movies, video clips, and HDTV channels) and Web pages (e.g., portal pages of the commercial Internet search engines). Maintaining a list of these hot Web pages and CM streams in a content addressable buffer enables a server to multicast hot streams with lower latency and higher system throughput. Cold Web pages and CM streams are treated as regular Web and CM requests. Interactive CM operations such as pause (P), resume (R), fast-forward (FF), and rewind (RW) have to be executed without allocation of extra resources. The proposed multimedia server model is a part of the distributed network with load balancing schedulers. The SM is connected to an integrated disk scheduler (IDS), which supervises an allocated disk manager. The IDS follows the same priority handling as the SM, and implements a SCAN disk-scheduling method for an improved disk access and a higher throughput. Different disks are used for the Web and CM services in order to meet the QoS requirements of CM services. The IDS ouput is forwarded to an Integrated Transmission Scheduler (ITS). The ITS creates a priority ordered buffering of the retrieved Web pages and CM data streams that are fed into an auto regressive moving average (ARMA) based traffic shaping circuitry before being transmitted through the network.
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