Performance analysis of local caching replacement policies for internet video streaming services

Abstract

In this work, the performance of 5 representative caching replacement policies was investigated and compared for caching Internet video-on-demand (VoD) in local access networks. Two measured traces of end-user requests were used in the analyses for two typical VoD services: TV-on-demand and user generated content represented by YouTube. The studied policies range from simple least recently used (LRU) and least frequently used (LFU) algorithms to more advanced ones denoted as LFU-dynamic lifespan (LFU-DL), Adaptive replacement cache (ARC) and Greedy-dual size frequency (GDSF). Our results show that the ARC policy always outperforms the other policies due to its adaptive nature and its ability to track changes in the traffic patterns. On the other hand, the simple LRU policy can also achieve a caching performance which is comparable to that of the more advanced ARC policy especially for the TV-on-demand service when the potential caching gain is high. On the contrary, the simple LFU policy always shows the poorest performance. However, by applying a proper lifespan supplement under the LFU-DL policy, the caching performance can be effectively enhanced to the level achievable using ARC and LRU policies. Moreover, the GDSF policy does not outperform simple LRU or LFU-DL, especially for YouTube video clips when the potential caching gain is relatively low. The advantage of GDSF manifested in our analysis is, however, its outstanding cache space usage efficiency among the five studied caching algorithms.