CAREER: Broadcast Disks: Technique for Data in Management in Asymmetric Communication Environments

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Many emerging networked applications have the property that communication among nodes is asymmetric. Typically, servers can and/or must send much more data to clients than clients send back to the servers. Examples include wireless networks with mobile clients, cable and direct satellite broadcast TV systems, information dispersal and information retrieval applications. Broadcast Disks technique exploits the characteristics of such environments, by treating a broadcast stream of data that are repeatedly and cyclicly transmitted as a storage device. The essence of this approach is to superimpose multiple broadcast programs (or `disks`) spinning at different speeds on a single broadcast channel; in effect, creating an arbitrarily fine-grained memory hierarchy. The technique also integrates the use of client storage resources for caching and prefetching data that is delivered over the broadcast. The Broadcast Disks approach provides improved performance for non-uniformly accessed data and increased availability of important data. The challenges being addressed in this project include: broadcast program generation, caching and prefetching strategies, and adapting to volatile data, changing client needs, and communication errors. The results of this research will be techniques, analyses, and prototype implementations of this novel approach, which has the potential to significantly improve the performance and availability of future distributed computing systems. The education portion of this project aims to develop new courses, software tools and laboratories that will provide students at all levels with more direct, hands-on experience in building database systems and applications.