A High Availability Cluster Streaming Media Server With Proxy Function

Thanks to the development of multimedia technologies and high-speed networks, traditional web sites are changing into multimedia web sites, and new multimedia networking applications seem to be emerging everyday. Multimedia entertainment applications like video on demand, online songs and movies, IP telephony, Internet radio and television, and interactive games have now become popular networking applications over the Internet. More and more Internet users'eager to getting a high quality of multimedia service.Because servers are the kernel of variable service, it is very efficient to improve the quality of the service by configure high performance hardware. So it is streaming media server. What streaming media service concerns about is how to let Internet clients enjoy the high quality, fluency live-live and VOD service. Obviously, streaming media delivering is the core of service. How to fulfill such real-time, synchronizing, mass data and so on characteristic of multimedia data, is the top problem streaming media server had to deal with. Only solving these problems, server can provide much better service.Face these problems; this paper proper a cluster based streaming media server system enables proxy function named GridSS (Grid Streaming Server). The design goal of GridSS is reducing client-perceived access latencies as well as server network loads. GridSS adopts cluster architecture to acquire more computing resource. Meanwhile, in order to alleviate the backbone's payload, every server nodes are deployed at the edge of the Internet and clients'requests are routed to the nearest server node through CDN (Content Delivery Networks). Cluster file system is installed as storage pools to provide scalable, high available file I/O service.Testing proves that GridSS can provide a great deal of Internet users with powerful, stable and availability streaming media service. So is proxy function. Testing result show that the server can serve one hundreds of concurrency clients by proxy in the 100Mbps local are network.