Global memory management in distributed multimedia storage systems

Multimedia storage systems need to handle continuous media data and conventional types of data. Continuous media data access requires high I/O rates and tends to last for a relatively long period of time. However this can drasticaly degrade the performance of accesses to other data types. A new cooperative caching policy called GLNU suitable for the access to continuous media is proposed in the distributed multimedia storage systems. Simulation results indicate our new policy outperforms other cache management policies and greatly improves the cache hit rate and thus reduces the disk I/O for continuous media data.