Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:41:49 GMT Server: Apache-SSL/0.4.3b Content-type: text/html Content-length: 2415 Last-modified: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 01:28:24 GMT Broadcast Disks

Broadcast Disks:
Data Management for Asymmetric
Communication Environments


The Broadcast Disks project is investigating the use of data broadcast to provide improved performance, scalability, and availability in an increasingly important class of networked applications. Many emerging application environments have the property that communication among nodes is asymmetric. Typically, servers can and/or must send much more data to clients than clients send back to the servers. Examples include wireless networks with mobile clients, cable and direct satellite broadcast television, information dispersal and information retrieval applications. Broadcast Disks exploits communication asymmetry by treating a broadcast stream of data that are repeatedly and cyclicly transmitted as a storage device. The broadcast disk technique has two main components. First, multiple broadcast programs (or ``disks'') with different latencies are superimposed on a single broadcast channel, in order to provide improved performance for non-uniform data access patterns and increased availability for critical data. Second, the technique integrates the use of client storage resources for caching and prefetching data that is delivered over the broadcast. The challenges being addressed in this project include: broadcast program generation, caching and prefetching strategies, and adapting to volatile data, changing client needs, and communication errors.


Brown UMCP

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