Introduction - Scalable Continuous Media Streaming Systems - page 16

Case #1

Case #2

Case #3

System Scale/Capacity

Figure 1.13 Three different types of cost/capacity relations in scaling up a system

Time

Time

Capacity

Space

Quality Complexity

Figure 1.14 Five dimensions of engineering tradeoffs

1.6 Engineering Trade-offs
In devising solutions to address the previous challenges, we often are faced with conflicting
design goals. Thus, for a given problem, there are often many possible solutions, each repre-
senting different engineering tradeoffs. In this section we attempt to illustrate this process of
engineering tradeoffs by considering five dimensions (Figure 1.14):

Capacity - such as disk I/O throughput and network bandwidth utilization;
Time - such as start-up delay and response time;
Space - such as storage requirement and buffer requirement;
Quality - such as media quality and service quality; and
Complexity - such as computational complexity and implementation complexity.