Introduction - Scalable Continuous Media Streaming Systems - page 15

Clients

Media Server

Network

(a)

Clients

Media Server

Network

Overloaded
- Increases in waiting time
- Decreases in service quality

(b)

Clients

Replicated Media Servers

Network

(c)

Figure 1.12 Increasing the service capacity of a media streaming system

Clearly, many of the aforementioned failures will render a media server inoperable. To
enable the system to survive a server failure, we will need to introduce hardware/capacity
redundancy and fault-tolerant mechanisms into the system. The parallel server architectures in
Part II of this topic provide one approach to addressing the reliability as well as the scalability
challenges.