Staggered striping in multimedia information systems

Multimedia information systems have emerged as an essential component of many application domains ranging from library information systems to entertainment technology. However, most implementations of these systems cannot support the continuous display of multimedia objects and suffer from frequent disruptions and delays termed hiccups. This is due to the low I/O bandwidth of the current disk technology, the high bandwidth requirement of multimedia objects, and the large size of these objects that almost always requires them to be disk resident. One approach to resolve this limitation is to decluster a multimedia object across multiple disk drives in order to employ the aggregate bandwidth of several disks to support the continuous retrieval (and display) of objects. This paper describes staggered striping as a novel technique to provide effective support for multiple users accessing the different objects in the database. Detailed simulations confirm the superiority of staggered striping.