MMS: multi merge and split buffer management scheme for video-on-demand systems

The interval caching buffer management scheme uses temporal locality of a group of I/O streams serving videos on demand. A group of I/O streams served by a single stream is called a session. In such cases, all I/O streams in the session, except one, will experience buffer hits. Also, the I/O stream of the client may leave the session resulting in a wastage of memory as the Video-on-Demand (VoD) system provides VCR-like functions e.g. play, pause, rewind and fast-forward. Our proposed interval-based buffer management technique merges the streams of a number of sessions and returns the same number of sessions with minimum memory wastage. In the MMS buffer management scheme, the number of streams of the sessions are grouped together to form the same number of sessions by using a greedy approach to reduce the memory requirement. An integer constant called block-factor is defined to be a limiting factor for the extra blocks allocated for a new stream to be grouped with the existing session. The simulation study shows that the MMS buffer management scheme reduces memory wastage as the block-factor increases.