Quality of service evaluations of multicast streaming protocols

Recently proposed scalable on-demand streaming protocols have previously been evaluated using a system cost measure termed the "required server bandwidth". For the scalable protocols that provide immediate service to each client when the server is not overloaded, this paper develops simple analytic models to evaluate two client-oriented quality of service metrics, namely (1) the mean client waiting time in systems where clients are willing to wait if a (well-provisioned) server is temporarily overloaded, and (2) the fraction of clients who balk (i.e., leave without receiving their requested media content) in systems where the clients will tolerate no or only very low service delays during a temporary overload. The models include novel approximate MVA techniques that appear to extend the range of applicability of customized AMVA to include questions focussed on state probabilities rather than on mean values, and to systems in which the operating points of interest do not include substantial client queues. For example, the new AMVA models accurately estimate the server bandwidth needed to achieve a balking rate as low as one in ten thousand. The analytic models can easily be applied to determine the server bandwidth needed for a given number of media files, anticipated total client request rate and file access frequencies, and target balking rate or mean wait. Results show that (a) scalable media servers that are configured with the "required server bandwidth" defined in previous work have low mean wait but may have unacceptably high client balking rates (i.e., greater than one in twenty), (b) for high to moderate client load, only a 10 - 50% increase in the previously defined required server bandwidth is needed to achieve a very low balking rate (e.g., one in ten thousand), and (c) media server performance (either mean wait or balking rate) degrades rapidly if the actual client load is more than 10% greater than the anticipated load.