A Literature Survey of Cooperative Caching in Content Distribution Networks

Content distribution networks (CDNs) which serve to deliver web objects (e.g., documents, applications, music and video, etc.) have seen tremendous growth since its emergence. To minimize the retrieving delay experienced by a user with a request for a web object, caching strategies are often applied - contents are replicated at edges of the network which is closer to the user such that the network distance between the user and the object is reduced. In this literature survey, evolution of caching is studied. A recent research paper [15] in the field of large-scale caching for CDN was chosen to be the anchor paper which serves as a guide to the topic. Research studies after and relevant to the anchor paper are also analyzed to better evaluate the statements and results of the anchor paper and more importantly, to obtain an unbiased view of the large scale collaborate caching systems as a whole.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Watch Global, Cache Local: YouTube Network Traffic at a Campus Network - Measurements and Implications

User Generated Content has become very popular since the birth of web services such as YouTube allowing the distribution of such user-produced media content in an easy manner. YouTube-like services are different from existing traditional VoD services because the service provider has only limited control over the creation of new content. We analyze how the content distribution in YouTube is realized and then conduct a measurement study of YouTube traffic in a large university campus network. The analysis of the traffic shows that: (1) No strong correlation is observed between global and local popularity; (2) neither time scale nor user population has an impact on the local popularity distribution; (3) video clips of local interest have a high local popularity. Using our measurement data to drive trace-driven simulations, we also demonstrate the implications of alternative distribution infrastructures on the performance of a YouTube-like VoD service. The results of these simulations show that client-based local caching, P2P-based distribution, and proxy caching can reduce network traffic significantly and allow faster access to video clips

Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution

OVERVIEW The International Web Content Caching and Distribution Workshop (WCW) is a premiere technical meeting for researchers and practitioners interested in all aspects of content caching, distribution and delivery on the Internet. The 2001 WCW meeting was held on the Boston University Campus. Building on the successes of the five previous WCW meetings, WCW01 featured a strong technical program and record participation from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. This report includes all the technical papers presented at WCW'01. Note: Proceedings of WCW'01 are published by Elsevier. Hardcopies of these proceedings can be purchased through the workshop organizers. As a service to the community, electronic copies of all WCW'01 papers are accessible through Technical Report BUCS‐TR‐2001‐017, available from the Boston University Computer Science Technical Report Archives at http://www.cs.bu.edu/techreps. [Ed.note: URL outdated. Use http://www.bu.edu/cs/research/technical-reports/ or http://hdl.handle.net/2144/1455 in this repository to access the reports.]Cisco Systems; InfoLibria; Measurement Factory Inc; Voler

Impact of traffic mix on caching performance in a content-centric network

For a realistic traffic mix, we evaluate the hit rates attained in a two-layer cache hierarchy designed to reduce Internet bandwidth requirements. The model identifies four main types of content, web, file sharing, user generated content and video on demand, distinguished in terms of their traffic shares, their population and object sizes and their popularity distributions. Results demonstrate that caching VoD in access routers offers a highly favorable bandwidth memory tradeoff but that the other types of content would likely be more efficiently handled in very large capacity storage devices in the core. Evaluations are based on a simple approximation for LRU cache performance that proves highly accurate in relevant configurations

An Optimal Trade-off between Content Freshness and Refresh Cost

Caching is an effective mechanism for reducing bandwidth usage and alleviating server load. However, the use of caching entails a compromise between content freshness and refresh cost. An excessive refresh allows a high degree of content freshness at a greater cost of system resource. Conversely, a deficient refresh inhibits content freshness but saves the cost of resource usages. To address the freshness-cost problem, we formulate the refresh scheduling problem with a generic cost model and use this cost model to determine an optimal refresh frequency that gives the best tradeoff between refresh cost and content freshness. We prove the existence and uniqueness of an optimal refresh frequency under the assumptions that the arrival of content update is Poisson and the age-related cost monotonically increases with decreasing freshness. In addition, we provide an analytic comparison of system performance under fixed refresh scheduling and random refresh scheduling, showing that with the same average refresh frequency two refresh schedulings are mathematically equivalent in terms of the long-run average cost

Cooperative announcement-based caching for video-on-demand streaming

Recently, video-on-demand (VoD) streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have gained a lot of popularity. This has led to a strong increase in bandwidth capacity requirements in the network. To reduce this network load, the design of appropriate caching strategies is of utmost importance. Based on the fact that, typically, a video stream is temporally segmented into smaller chunks that can be accessed and decoded independently, cache replacement strategies have been developed that take advantage of this temporal structure in the video. In this paper, two caching strategies are proposed that additionally take advantage of the phenomenon of binge watching, where users stream multiple consecutive episodes of the same series, reported by recent user behavior studies to become the everyday behavior. Taking into account this information allows us to predict future segment requests, even before the video playout has started. Two strategies are proposed, both with a different level of coordination between the caches in the network. Using a VoD request trace based on binge watching user characteristics, the presented algorithms have been thoroughly evaluated in multiple network topologies with different characteristics, showing their general applicability. It was shown that in a realistic scenario, the proposed election-based caching strategy can outperform the state-of-the-art by 20% in terms of cache hit ratio while using 4% less network bandwidth

Performance Evaluation of Caching Policies in NDN - an ICN Architecture

Information Centric Networking (ICN) advocates the philosophy of accessing the content independent of its location. Owing to this location independence in ICN, the routers en-route can be enabled to cache the content to serve the future requests for the same content locally. Several ICN architectures have been proposed in the literature along with various caching algorithms for caching and cache replacement at the routers en-route. The aim of this paper is to critically evaluate various caching policies using Named Data Networking (NDN), an ICN architecture proposed in literature. We have presented the performance comparison of different caching policies naming First In First Out (FIFO), Least Recently Used (LRU), and Universal Caching (UC) in two network models; Watts-Strogatz (WS) model (suitable for dense short link networks such as sensor networks) and Sprint topology (better suited for large Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks) using ndnSIM, an ns3 based discrete event simulator for NDN architecture. Our results indicate that UC outperforms other caching policies such as LRU and FIFO and makes UC a better alternative for both sensor networks and ISP networks