Philip W. Frey
Gustavo Alonso
ABSTRACT
Internet usage has changed dramatically in the past few years. Content is no longer dominated by static websites, but comprises an increasing number of multimedia streams. With the widespread availability of broadband connections, the quality of the media provided by video-on-demand as well as streaming services increases constantly. Even though today most videos are still encoded with a rather low bit rate, large Internet service providers already foresee high-definition media becoming the predominant format in the near future. However, a larger number of clients requesting media at high bit rates poses a challenge for the server infrastructure. Conventional stream dissemination methods, such as RTP over UDP or HTTP over TCP, result in high server loads due to excessive local data copy, context switching, and interrupt processing overhead. In this paper, we illustrate and discuss this problem in detail through extensive experiments with existing solutions. We then present a new approach based on zero-copy protocol stack implementations in software as well as dedicated RDMA hardware. Our performance experiments indicate that these optimizations allow servers to scale better and remove most of the overhead caused by current approaches.
- Apple Inc. Darwin Streaming Server. http://developer.apple.com/opensource/server/streaming/Google Scholar
- D.Dalessandro and P.Wyckoff. Accelerating web protocols using RDMA. In Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computingand Applications, 2007.Google Scholar
- Ecole Centrale Paris. VLC media player. http://www.videolan.org.Google Scholar
- K.Fall and J.Pasquale. Exploiting in-kernel data paths to improve I/O throughput and CPU availability. In Proceedings of the Winter 1993 USENIX Conference, pages 327--333, 1993.Google Scholar
- K.Fall and J.Pasquale. Improving continuous-media playback performance with in-kernel data paths. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS), pages 100--109, 1994.Google ScholarCross Ref
- P.Halvorsen, E.Jorde, K.-A. Skevik, V.Goebel, and T.Plagemann. Performance tradeoffs for static allocation of zero-copy buffers. In Proceedings of the 28th Euromicro Conference, 2002.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J.Hilland, P.Culley, J.Pinkerton, and R.Recio. RDMA Protocol Verbs Specification, Version 1.0. http://www.rdmaconsortium.org/home/draft-hilland-iwarp-verbs-v1.0-RDMAC.pdf.Google Scholar
- InfiniBand Trade Association. InfiniBand architecture specification. http://www.infinibandta.org.Google Scholar
- J.Levon. OProfile - A System Profiler for Linux. http://oprofile.sourceforge.net.Google Scholar
- Miniwatts Marketing Group. World internet stats. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.Google Scholar
- J.C. Mogul and A.Borg. The effect of context switches on cache performance. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pages 75--84, 1991. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F.Neeser, B.Metzler, and P.W. Frey. SoftRDMA. http://www.zurich.ibm.com/sys/servers/rdma_soft.html.Google Scholar
- T.P. Nguyen and A.Zakhor. Distributed video streaming over internet. In Proceedings of Multimedia Computing and Networking, pages 186--195, 2002.Google Scholar
- OpenFabrics Alliance. OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution. http://www.openfabrics.org/.Google Scholar
- T.Plagemann, V.Goebel, P.Halvorsen, and O.Anshus. Operating system support for multimedia systems. The Computer Communications Journal, 23:267--289, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R.Recio, B.Metzler, P.Culley, J.Hilland, and D.Garcia. A Remote Direct Memory Access Protocol Specification, 2007.Google Scholar
- V.Saxena. Bandwidth drivers for 100 G Ethernet. http://www.ieee802.org/3/hssg/public/jan07/Saxena_01_0107.pdf.Google Scholar
- K.Stuhlmüller, N.Färber, M.Link, and B.Girod. Analysis of video transmission over lossy channels. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 18:1012--1032, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Texas Memory Systems. Ramsan-5000. http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-5000/.Google Scholar
- S.R. Viswanathan and T.Imielinski. Metropolitan area video-on-demand service using pyramid broadcasting. Multimedia Systems, 4:197--208, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D.Wu, Y.T. Hou, W.Zhu, Y.qin Zhang, and J.M. Peha. Streaming video over the internet: Approaches and directions. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 11:282--300, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Server-efficient high-definition media dissemination
Recommendations
Scalable connectionless RDMA over unreliable datagrams
We demonstrate non-connection-based RDMA methods for iWARP Ethernet networks.RDMA Write-Record is the first RDMA operation for unreliable transports.The new methods show improved performance and scalability.The methods are proven for both commercial and ...
Revisiting network support for RDMA
SIGCOMM '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data CommunicationThe advent of RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) has led to a significant increase in the use of RDMA in datacenter networks. To achieve good performance, RoCE requires a lossless network which is in turn achieved by enabling Priority Flow Control (PFC)...
Hybrid chaining scheme for video-on-demand applications based on popularity
AIC'08: Proceedings of the 8th conference on Applied informatics and communicationsA true Video-on-Demand (VoD) service, specifies the transmission of a dedicated video stream from a video server to the subscribed user. In proxy assisted transmission schemes, although it reduces load on server and increases network efficiency, but ...
Comments