Research Article
Design and Implementation of Streaming Media
Server Cluster Based on FFMpeg
Hong Zhao, Chun-long Zhou, and Bao-zhao Jin
School of Computer and Communication, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou 730050, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Hong Zhao; @qq.com
Received August ; Revised October ; Accepted October
Academic Editor: Hongwei Guo
Copyright © Hong Zhao et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Poor performance and network congestion are commonly observed in the streaming media single server system. is paper
proposes a scheme to construct a streaming media server cluster system based on FFMpeg. In this scheme, dierent users are
distributed to dierent servers according to their locations and the balance among servers is maintained by the dynamic load-
balancing algorithm based on active feedback. Furthermore, a service redirection algorithm is proposed to improve the transmission
eciency of streaming media data. e experiment results show that the server cluster system has signicantly alleviated the
network congestion and improved the performance in comparison with the single server system.
1. Introduction
With the rapid development of streaming media technology
and the expansion of its application elds, more and more
users want to enjoy high denition video. As a result, large
volume of media data needs to be transmitted over the
network and the server loads increase dramatically []. In
order to handle the massive volume of data, the streaming
media system has to alleviate the load of backbone network
to avoid network congestion.
In conventional streaming media single server system,
allthetasksareprocessedbyonlyoneserver.iskindof
data processing causes low parallel service and poor capacity
of streaming media server. It is dicult to meet the current
network requirements of large quantity of VOD (video on
demand) and low data transmission of the streaming media
system. e streaming media server cluster with superb
scalability and fault tolerance is an eective method to
resolve the problem of servers overloading and provide high
quality service. For the purpose of improving the service
performance, tasks are assigned to dierent nodes by using
load-balancing scheduling mechanisms [–]. With regard
to streaming media system, most of the studies focus on
the load-balancing algorithm. For instance, Wonjae Lee
propose a load-balancing system for IPTV Web application
virtualizationwhichsupportshighavailabilityanddistributes
tasks based on server loads []. A new load-balancing policy,
named ADuS, is proposed in [], which attempts to partition
jobs according to their present sizes and further rank servers
based on their loads. Although these algorithms have been
usedtoimprovetheperformanceofstreamingmediaserver
cluster in the simulation experiments, they did not consider
thewholelayoutandspecicapplications.Andfewofthem
have proved their feasibilities in a real streaming media server
cluster system.
However, there are only a few studies focusing on the pro-
tocols. For example, in [], the streaming media content type
and streaming protocols are used to relieve the bandwidth
bottleneck and make smooth transmission of streaming
media data. But when the number of the users increases, the
service performance will become unsatisfactory. FFMpeg []
is the excellent soware to provide streaming media system
platform. It not only contains some crucial and indispensable
tools for streaming media system, such as FFPlay, FFServer
[, ],butsupportsmostofthecodecwhichcanenhance
the applicability of streaming media system, such as H.,
MPEG [, ].
In this paper, we propose a scheme to construct a stream-
ing media server cluster based on FFMpeg. In this server
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
e Scientific World Journal
Volume 2015, Article ID 963083, 7 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/963083