Dylan McNamee

Research challenges in environmental observation and forecasting systems

We describe Environmental Observation and Forecasting Systems (EOFS), a new class of large-scale distributed system designed to monitor, model, and forecast wide-area physical processes such as river systems. EOFS have strong social relevance in areas such as education, transportation, agriculture, natural resource planning and disaster response. In addition, they represent an opportunity for scientists to study large physical systems to an extent that was not previously possible. Building the next generation of EOFS pose a number of difficult challenges in all aspects of wireless networking, including media protocols for long distance vertical communication through water, flooding algorithms in ad-hoc network topologies, support for rate- and time-sensitive applications, and location-dependent mobile computing.

Player for adaptive MPEG video streaming over the Internet

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time, streaming, Internet video and audio player. The player has a number of advanced features including dynamic adaptation to changes in available bandwidth, latency and latency variation; a multi-dimensional media scaling capability driven by user-specified quality of service (QoS) requirements; and support for complex content comprising multiple synchronized video and audio streams. The player was developed as part of the QUASAR project at Oregon Graduate Institute, is freely available, and serves as a testbed for research in adaptive resource management and QoS control.

Specialization tools and techniques for systematic optimization of system software

Specialization has been recognized as a powerful technique for optimizing operating systems. However, specialization has not been broadly applied beyond the research community because current techniques based on manual specialization, are time-consuming and error-prone. The goal of the work described in this paper is to help operating system tuners perform specialization more easily. We have built a specialization toolkit that assists the major tasks of specializing operating systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the toolkit by applying it to three diverse operating system components. We show that using tools to assist specialization enables significant performance optimizations without error-prone manual modifications. Our experience with the toolkit suggests new ways of designing systems that combine high performance and clean structure.

Quality of Service Semantics for Multimedia Database Systems

Quality of service (QoS) support has been a hot research topic in multimedia databases, and multimedia systems in general, for the past several years. However, there remains little consensus on how QoS support should be provided. At the resource-management level, systems designers are still debating the suitability of reservation-based versus adaptive QoS management. The design of higher system layers is less clearly understood, and the specification of QoS requirements in domain-specific terms is still an open research topic. To address these issues, we propose a QoS model for multimedia databases. The model covers the specification of user-level QoS preferences and their relationship to QoS control at the resource-management level, and is applicable to adaptive and reservation-based systems. In this paper we present the model, discuss the implications it has for multimedia database design, and describe a practical implementation of it.

Rate-Matching Packet Scheduler for Real-Rate Applications

A packet scheduler is an operating system component that controls the allocation of network interface bandwidth to outgoing network flows. By deciding which packet to send next, packet schedulers not only determine how bandwidth is shared among flows, but also play a key role in determining the rate and timing behavior of individual flows. The recent explosion of rate and timing-sensitive flows, particularly in the context of multimedia applications, has focused new interest on packet schedulers. Next generation packet schedulers must not only ensure separation among flows and meet real-time performance constraints, they must also support dynamic fine- grain real-location of bandwidth for flows with variable-bit- rate requirements. Unfortunately, todays packet schedulers either do not support rate and timing sensitive flows, or do so with reservation systems that are relatively coarse-grain and inflexible. This paper makes two contributions. First it shows how bandwidth requirements can be inferred directly from real-rate flows, without requiring explicit specifications from the application. Second, it presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a rate-matching packet scheduler that uses these inferred requirements to automatically and dynamically control the bandwidth allocation to flows.

Adaptive Prefetching for Device Independent File I/O

Device independent I/O has been a holy grail to operating system designers since the early days of UNIX. Unfortunately, existing operating systems fall short of this goal for multimedia applications. Techniques such as caching and sequential read-ahead can help mask I/O latency in some cases, but in others they increase latency and add substantial jitter. Multimedia applications, such as video players, are sensitive to vagaries in performance since I/O latency and jitter affect the quality of presentation. Our solution uses adaptive prefetching to reduce both latency and jitter. Applications submit file access plans to the prefetcher, which then generates I/O requests to the operating system and manages the buffer cache to isolate the application from variations in device performance. Our experiments show device independence can be achieved: an MPEG video player sees the same latency when reading from a local disk or an NFS server. Moreover, our approach reduces jitter substantially.

Predictable File Access Latency for Multimedia

Multimedia applications are sensitive to I/O latency and jitter when accessing data in secondary storage. Transparent adaptive prefetching (TAP) uses software feedback to provide multimedia applications with file system quality of service (QoS) guarantees. We are investigating how QoS requirements can be communicated and how they can be met by adaptive resource management. A preliminary test of adaptive prefetching is presented.