Abstract: | With the success of Internet video-on-demand (VoD) streaming services, the bandwidth required and the financial cost incurred
by the host of the video server becoming extremely large. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and proxies are two common ways for
reducing the server workload. In this paper, we consider a peer-assisted Internet VoD system with proxies deployed at domain
gateways. We formally present the video caching problem with the objectives of reducing the video server workload and avoiding
inter-domain traffic, and we obtain its optimal solution. Inspired by theoretical analysis, we develop a practical protocol
named PopCap for Internet VoD services. Compared with previous work, PopCap does not require additional infrastructure support,
is inexpensive, and able to cope well with the characteristic workloads of Internet VoD services. From simulation-based experiments
driven by real-world data sets from YouTube, we find that PopCap can effectively reduce the video server workload, therefore
provides a superior performance regarding the video server’s traffic reduction. |