Earthworm: a network memory management technique for large-scale distributed multimedia applications

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Abstract
The two main operating constraints of today's multimedia servers are the I/O bandwidth and communication bandwidth limitations. Both of these problems are addressed in this paper using a novel technique called "Earthworm". In this scheme, the network memory is used as a huge cache for buffering multimedia data. Dramatic reduction in the demand on the I/O bandwidth, therefore, can be achieved. This scheme also chains display stations to allow them to forward video streams. This strategy eliminates the congestion at the communication port of the server. Removing this bottleneck allows our technique to operate on the vast aggregate bandwidth of the WAN, rather than being constrained by the very limited local bandwidth available to the server. A unique feature of the Earthworm approach is that every display station using the server attempts to make some contribution to the caching space and communication bandwidth. The arrival of a new request, therefore, can be seen as a contributor, rather than just a burden to the server. This characteristic ensures the scalability of our design to support very large multimedia applications.

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