Broadcast Disks

By Anubhav Trivedi

Introduction to Broadcasting

1. Broadcasting is distribution of audio and/or video signals which transmit

programs to an audience. The audience may be the general public or a
relatively large sub-audience, such as children or young adults.

2. The sequencing of content in a broadcast is called a schedule.

3. Television and radio programs are distributed through radio

broadcasting or cable, often both simultaneously. By coding signals and
having decoding equipment in homes, the latter also enables
subscription-based channels and pay-per-view services.

4. Broadcasting forms a very large segment of the mass media.

Broadcasting to a very narrow range of audience is called
narrowcasting.

5. The first regular television broadcasts began in 1937.

Asymmetric Communication Environments

In many existing and emerging application domains the downstream communication capacity from
servers to clients is much greater than the upstream communication capacity
from clients back to servers. We refer to these environments as Asymmetric Communications
Environments.

Communications asymmetry can arise in two ways:

The first is from the bandwidth limitations of the physical communications
medium.
Stationary servers have powerful broadcast transmitters while mobile
clients have little or no transmission capability.

Because asymmetry can arise due to either physical devices or workload

characteristics, the class of asymmetric communications environments spans a
wide range of important systems and applications, encompassing both wired and
wireless networks. Examples include:

w Wireless networks with stationary base stations and mobile clients.

W Information dispersal systems for volatile, time-sensitive information such

as stock prices, weather information, traffic updates, factory floor
information, etc.

i Cable or satellite broadcast television networks with settop boxes that

allow viewers to communicate with the broadcasting home office, and video-
on-demand servers.

o Information retrieval systems with large client populations, such as mail-

order catalog services, mutual fund information services, software help
desks, etc.

Broadcast Disks

1. The Broadcast Disks project is focused on the use of data broadcast to

provide improved performance, scalability, and availability in an
increasingly important class of networked environments, namely, those
with asymmetric communication. Examples include wireless networks
with mobile clients, cable and direct satellite broadcast networks,
information dissemination and information retrieval applications.

2. Broadcast Disks exploits communication asymmetry by treating a

broadcast stream of data that are repeatedly and cyclicly transmitted
as a storage device.

Two Main Components of Broadcast Disks

1. 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.

2. Second, the technique integrates the use of client storage resources

for caching and prefetching data that is delivered over the broadcast.

Broadcast Disk Approaches

1. Flat Approach: Data is broadcasted as a union of all that is requested in a

cyclic manner.

2. Skewed Approach or Random Approach: Requests are broadcasted randomly

as they arrive. The goal is that the interarrival time between two
instances of the same item matches the clients needs.

Assumptions

1. Wireless data broadcasting can be as storage on the air.

2. Broadcast is periodic in nature.

3. Bucket is the logical unit of broadcast.

4. Each bucket has an address or sequence no. within the broadacast.

5. Data changes often.

6. Each successive broadcast may differ in size and contents.

7. No updates during a particular broadcast.

8. Client has no prior knowledge of the structure of the broadcast.

9. Clients are interested in fetching a particular record identified by a

key.
 10. Access Time: Avg. time elapsed between beginning of search of an item to
the downloading of it from broadcast channel.

11. Tuning Time: The time for which client is listening or tuning the
channel.

Broadcast Scheduling Algorithms

1. FCFS

2. Round Robin

3. Priority Scheduling

4. Request Wait Algorithm

We will study Request wait algorithm

Its Assumptions:

1. Broadcast has fixed data items.

2. Time Required to transmit 1 item is called “ Broadcast Tick ”.

3. Clients keep listening after making requests.

4. Delay time errors are ignored

5. No other errors

R X W Algorithm

1. For each page with pending requests , maintain:

o PID – Page identifier

o REQcnt – No. of outstanding requests

o 1st arv – Time stamp of earliest unsatisfied request.

2. On request arrival
 o Look up the page

o If found

o Increment REQcnt

o Else

o Add new entry ; REQcnt = 1; 1st arv = current time

3. At each broadcast

o Broadcast the page with maximum value of R X W where

o R = REQcnt

o W = clock – 1st arv , where clock is current time

Data Management in broadcast disks

The algorithm has the following steps (for simplicity, assume that data items are “pages”, that is,
they are of a uniform, fixed length):
1. Order the pages from hottest (most popular) to coldest.
2. Partition the list of pages into multiple ranges,where each range contains pages with similar
access probabilities. These ranges are referred to as disks.
3. Choose the relative frequency of broadcast for each of the disks. The only restriction on the
relative frequencies is that they must be integers. For example given two disks, disk 1 could be
broadcast three times for every two times that disk 2 is broadcast, thus, rel freq(1) = 3, and rel
freq(2) = 2.
4. Split each disk into a number of smaller units. These units are called chunks (( ___ refers to
the _____ chunk in disk ). First, calculate max chunks as the Least Common Multiple (LCM)
of the relative frequencies. Then, split each disk into num chunks(i) = max chunks / rel freq(i)
chunks. In the previous example, num chunks(1) would be 2, while num chunks(2) would be 3.
5. Create the broadcast program by interleaving the chunks of each disks