In this paper, we present a distributed RAID style video server that addresses the problem of increasing video stream supplying capability in VOD systems. Distibuted RAID Stylemeans extending the RAID method usually applied to disks to the servers, so as to achieve improvements in performance and reliability. The great advantage of this architecture is that the linear performance improvement can be achieved by adding inexpensive servers of a diffusion model. We have implemented the RAID0 style and RAID4 style systems. A number of new features such as the array configuration method or the striping buffer are applied to them. A precise performance evaluation was made in a near practical environment, with more than 40 video streams. We tested the system, in both normal and degraded mode (server failure) and by checking frame drop rates as well as observing picture quality. An evaluation by simulation was also conducted. The results of the above evaluations agreed well with the calculation value, to confirm the feasibility of this architecture.

For providing person-to-person communication as well as improving office work efficiency, demands for multimedia communication services have increased. This paper discusses Integrated Voice/Data LAN (IVDLAN) for handling multimedia communications. First, the IEEE 802.9 IVDLAN working group activities on a user access network which dedicatedly provides a multi-megabit service over an existing unshielded twisted telephone cabling system are summarized. Next, this paper reveals the first commercial IVDLAN product APEX 8000/10 which meets the IEEE 802.9 architecture. A set of an ISDN terminal and an IEEE 802.3 terminal are connected to the node through a terminal adapter. The line rate is 4.096 Mbit/s and the maximum line length is 600m. The IVDLAN node has an 128 Mbit/s burst switching module and a 64 Mbit/s multiple-rate circuit switching module. The flow control in a user-network interface and backpressure control in the burst switching module achieve the data communication with low packet loss.

How to retrieve the closest content from an in-network cache is one of the most important issues in Information-Centric Networking (ICN). This paper proposes a novel content discovery scheme called Local Tree Hunting (LTH). By adding branch-cast functionality to a local tree for content requests to a Content-Centric Network (CCN) response node, the discovery area for caching nodes expands. Since the location of such a branch-casting node moves closer to the request node when the content is more widely cached, the discovery range, i.e. the branch size of the local tree, becomes smaller. Thus, the discovery area is autonomously adjusted depending on the content dissemination. With this feature, LTH is able to find the “almost true closest” caching node without checking all the caching nodes in the in-network cache. The performance analysis employed in Zipf's law content distribution model and which uses the Least Recently Used eviction rule shows the superiority of LTH with respect to identifying the almost exact closest cache.

The mechanism of environment-dependent self-organization of "positional information" in a coupled nonlinear oscillator system is proposed as a new principle of realtime coordinative control in biological distributed system. By modeling the pattern formation in tactic response of Physarum plasmodium, it is shown that a global phase gradient pattern self-organized by mutual entrainment encodes not only the positional relationship between subsystems and the total system but also the relative relationship between internal state of the system and the environment.