Recovery Strategies for Streaming Media Service in a Cluster-Based VOD Server with a Fault Node

Abstract

Due to the economic cost and good scalability, cluster-based server architecture is used for VOD services. This server consists of a front-end node and multiple backend nodes. In this server architecture, backend nodes are added simply to support large-scale on-demand clients. However, as the number of backend nodes increases, the possibility of backend node failure also increases. A backend node fault not only degrades the quality of serviced streaming media but also decreases the number of streams supported in the VOD server. For successful VOD service, even if a backend node enters a fault state, the streaming service in progress should be re-continued after a short recovery time. As the recovery strategy, when legacy RAID methods are applied to cluster-based VOD servers, the excessive internal network traffic between the backend nodes causes performance degradation. In addition, the backend nodes demonstrate inefficient CPU utilization for the recovery process. In this paper, to address these problems, a new fault recovery strategy is proposed based on the pipeline computing concept. The proposed method not only distributes the network traffic generated from the recovery operations but also makes efficient use of the CPU time available in the backend nodes. Based on these advantages, even if the cluster-based server has a backend node that fails, the proposed method provides more QoS streams compared to the existing recovery method. In addition, since the proposed method needs a very short recovery time, the streaming services in progress are sustained without degradation of media quality.