Cooperative Caching for Multimedia Streaming in Overlay Networks

Traditional data caching, such as web caching, only focuses on how to boost the hit rate of requested objects in caches, and therefore, how to reduce the initial delay for object retrieval. However, for multimedia objects, not only reducing the delay of object retrieval, but also provisioning reasonably stable network bandwidth to clients, while the fetching of the cached objects goes on, is important as well. In this paper, we propose our cooperative caching scheme for a multimedia delivery scenario, supporting a large number of peers over peer-to-peer overlay networks. In order to facilitate multimedia streaming and downloading service from servers, our caching scheme (1) determines the appropriate availability of cached stream segments in a cache community, (2) determines the appropriate peer for cache replacement, and (3) performs bandwidth-aware and availability-aware cache replacement. By doing so, it achieves (1) small delay of stream retrieval, (2) stable bandwidth provisioning during retrieval session, and (3) load balancing of clients' requests among peers

An experimental dynamic RAM video cache

As technological advances continue to be made, the demand for more efficient distributed multimedia systems is also affirmed. Current support for end-to-end QoS is still limited; consequently mechanisms are required to provide flexibility in resource loading. One such mechanism, caching, may be introduced both in the end-system and network to facilitate intelligent load balancing and resource management. We introduce new work at Lancaster University investigating the use of transparent network caches for MPEG-2. A novel architecture is proposed, based on router-oriented caching and the employment of large scale dynamic RAM as the sole caching medium. The architecture also proposes the use of the ISO/IEC standardised DSM-CC protocol as a basic control infrastructure and the caching of pre-built transport packets (UDP/IP) in the data plane. Finally, the work discussed is in its infancy and consequently focuses upon the design and implementation of the caching architecture rather than an investigation into performance gains, which we intend to make in a continuation of the work

Building Internet caching systems for streaming media delivery

The proxy has been widely and successfully used to cache the static Web objects fetched by a client so that the subsequent clients requesting the same Web objects can be served directly from the proxy instead of other sources faraway, thus reducing the server\u27s load, the network traffic and the client response time. However, with the dramatic increase of streaming media objects emerging on the Internet, the existing proxy cannot efficiently deliver them due to their large sizes and client real time requirements.;In this dissertation, we design, implement, and evaluate cost-effective and high performance proxy-based Internet caching systems for streaming media delivery. Addressing the conflicting performance objectives for streaming media delivery, we first propose an efficient segment-based streaming media proxy system model. This model has guided us to design a practical streaming proxy, called Hyper-Proxy, aiming at delivering the streaming media data to clients with minimum playback jitter and a small startup latency, while achieving high caching performance. Second, we have implemented Hyper-Proxy by leveraging the existing Internet infrastructure. Hyper-Proxy enables the streaming service on the common Web servers. The evaluation of Hyper-Proxy on the global Internet environment and the local network environment shows it can provide satisfying streaming performance to clients while maintaining a good cache performance. Finally, to further improve the streaming delivery efficiency, we propose a group of the Shared Running Buffers (SRB) based proxy caching techniques to effectively utilize proxy\u27s memory. SRB algorithms can significantly reduce the media server/proxy\u27s load and network traffic and relieve the bottlenecks of the disk bandwidth and the network bandwidth.;The contributions of this dissertation are threefold: (1) we have studied several critical performance trade-offs and provided insights into Internet media content caching and delivery. Our understanding further leads us to establish an effective streaming system optimization model; (2) we have designed and evaluated several efficient algorithms to support Internet streaming content delivery, including segment caching, segment prefetching, and memory locality exploitation for streaming; (3) having addressed several system challenges, we have successfully implemented a real streaming proxy system and deployed it in a large industrial enterprise

Distributed streaming media architecture

The recent trends in content delivery indicate that media distribution is among the fastest growing services over the Internet. The lack of QoS support in the Internet has accelerated the development of content distribution architectures and protocols employing techniques such as caching, mirroring and application layer multicast. Though there have been significant efforts in this direction, the large-scale deployment of such architectures is still a challenging problem. This motivates us to develop a novel architecture for content delivery over the best-effort Internet. Towards achieving this goal, we first identify the key components that build up the end-to-end architecture of a media distribution system and discuss their functionalities. Then, we propose a distributed streaming media architecture that is capable of addressing the requirements of client heterogeneity, scalability, and fault-tolerance, overcoming the deficiencies of traditional streaming media architectures. The proposed architecture is highly suitable for scalable encoding techniques such as Multiple Descriptive Coding and Layered Coding. To evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture, we define several performance metrics and carry out extensive simulation studies. Our studies show that clients experience better quality characteristics in the distributed architecture compared to the single server architecture. The proposed distributed architecture brings up several issues, such as quality adaptation, cache replacement and server fault-tolerance, which need further research

Managing video objects in large peer-to-peer systems

In peer-to-peer video systems, most hosts will retain only a small portion of a video after its playback. This presents two challenges in managing video data in such systems: (1) how a host can find enough video pieces, which may scatter among the whole system, to assemble a complete video, and (2) given a limited buffer size, what part of a video a host should cache. In this thesis, we address these problems with a new distributive file management technique. In our scheme, we organize hosts into many cells, each of which is a distinct set of hosts which together can supply a video in its entirety. Because each cell is dynamically created and individually managed as an independent video supplier, our technique addresses the two problems, video lookup and caching, simultaneously. First, a client looking for a video can stop its search as soon as it finds a host that caches any part of the video. This dramatically reduces the search scope of a video lookup. Second, caching operations can now be coordinated within each cell to balance data redundancy in the system. We have implemented a Gnutella-like simulation network and use it as a testbed to evaluate the proposed technique. Our extensive study shows convincingly the performance advantage of the new scheme