Optimizing Caching in a Patch Streaming Multimedia-on-Demand System

Abstract

In on-demand multimedia streaming systems, streaming techniques are usually combined with proxy caching to obtain better performance. The patch streaming technique has no start-up latency inherent to it, but requires extra bandwidth to deliver the media data in patch streams. This paper proposes a proxy caching technique which aims at reducing the bandwidth cost of the patch streaming technique. The proposed approach determines media prefixes with high patching cost and caches the appropriate media prefix at the proxy/local server. Herein the scheme is evaluated using a synthetically generated media access workload and its performance is compared with that of the popularity and prefix-aware interval caching scheme (the prefix part) and with that of patch streaming with no caching. The bandwidth saving, hit ratio and concurrent number of clients are used to compare the performance, and the proposed scheme is found to perform better for different caching capacities of the proxy server.