The Application Of PVM Clusters In The Linux Streaming Media Server

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and increasing demand for multimedia information on the web, streaming video contents over the Internet has received tremendous attention from academia and industry. By using the streaming techniques, the video content need not be downloaded in full, but is being played out while parts of the content are being received and decoded. Because of its real-time nature, media streaming typically has bandwidth, delay, and loss requirements. However, the current best-effort Internet does not offer any quality of service (QOS) guarantees to streaming media. Thus, Internet streaming media poses many challenges. The streaming media server needs even higher performance than the traditional WWW server, but hardware costs much. In this thesis, we use cluster technology to get a higher performance cost ratio.And traditionally, IP networks do not have the concept of commercial operation, but during the commercialization of the streaming media server, the authentication and accounting system is needed to support the commercial operation. Different from the telecom accounting system, it should support different media formats, and must have flexible accounting policy to choose. In this thesis, we implemented a PVM-based RADIUS authentication and accounting system, it can give better performance and availability, and it can support multi accounting policy.The Linux streaming media cluster server is a comprehensive system consisting of the Streaming Server, the RTSP-supported clients, the Authentication Server, the Accounting Server, and the Network Management Server. RTSP-support client is a MPEG-4 client software that receives and displays MPEG-4 content from the streaming server. When the client requests a new session, the Authentication Server is used to confirm the password. And the Accounting Server will compute the cost of the specific user. Meanwhile, the Network Management Server collects the relative information about the streaming server for loading balance and server control. With the help of the three protocols: RTSP, RADIUS, and SNMP, all these blocks could work along well with each other.