Segment-based proxy caching for Internet streaming media delivery

The proliferation of multimedia content on the Internet poses challenges to existing content delivery networks. While proxy caching can successfully deliver traditional text-based static objects, it faces difficulty delivering streaming media objects because of the objects' sizes as well as clients' rigorous continuous delivery demands. We present two techniques supporting segment based proxy caching of streaming media. We evaluated these techniques in simulations and real systems.     

Cache Optimization on Hot‐Point Proxy Caching Using Weighted‐Rank Cache Replacement Policy

The development of proxy caching is essential in the area of video‐on‐demand (VoD) to meet users' expectations. VoD requires high bandwidth and creates high traffic due to the nature of media. Many researchers have developed proxy caching models to reduce bandwidth consumption and traffic. Proxy caching keeps part of a media object to meet the viewing expectations of users without delay and provides interactive playback. If the caching is done continuously, the entire cache space will be exhausted at one stage. Hence, the proxy server must apply cache replacement policies to replace existing objects and allocate the cache space for the incoming objects. Researchers have developed many cache replacement policies by considering several parameters, such as recency, access frequency, cost of retrieval, and size of the object. In this paper, the Weighted‐Rank Cache replacement Policy (WRCP) is proposed. This policy uses such parameters as access frequency, aging, and mean access gap ratio and such functions as size and cost of retrieval. The WRCP applies our previously developed proxy caching model, Hot‐Point Proxy, at four levels of replacement, depending on the cache requirement. Simulation results show that the WRCP outperforms our earlier model, the Dual Cache Replacement Policy.     

基于段流行度的移动流媒体代理服务器缓存算法

提出了一种基于段流行度的移动流媒体代理服务器缓存算法P2CAS2M2(proxy caching algorithm based on segment popularity for mobile streaming media),根据移动流媒体对象段的流行度,实现了代理服务器缓存的接纳和替换,使移动流媒体对象在代理服务器中缓存的数据量和其流行度成正比,并且根据客户平均访问时间动态决定该对象缓存窗口大小。仿真结果表明,对于代理服务器缓存大小的变化,P2CAS2M2比A2LS(adaptive and lazy segmentation algorithm)具有更好的适应性,在缓存空间相同的情况下,能够得到更大的被缓存流媒体对象的平均数,更小的被延迟的初始请求率,降低了启动延时,而字节命中率接近甚至超过A2LS。     

Efficient web content delivery using proxy caching techniques

Web caching technology has been widely used to improve the performance of the Web infrastructure and reduce user-perceived network latencies. Proxy caching is a major Web caching technique that attempts to serve user Web requests from one or a network of proxies located between the end user and Web servers hosting the original copies of the requested objects. This paper surveys the main technical aspects of proxy caching and discusses recent developments in proxy caching research including caching the "uncacheable" and multimedia streaming objects, and various adaptive and integrated caching approaches.     

流媒体分发系统关键技术综述

 流媒体将是未来通信中的杀手业务.本文讨论了流媒体分发系统的关键技术,阐述了基于CDN (Content Distributed Network)和基于P2P (Peer to Peer )的流媒体的研究现状,针对基于CDN的流媒体,研究了流媒体调度算法,代理服务器缓存算法,基于CDN的交互式操作.针对基于P2P的流媒体,研究了数据分配算法,激励机制,流媒体对象的放置,应用层组播,基于P2P的交互式操作.指出了流媒体的未来研究方向.     

A Novel Dynamic and Scalable Caching Algorithm of Proxy Server for Multimedia Objects

This paper presents a novel dynamic and scalable caching algorithm of proxy server with a finite storage size for multimedia objects. Among the multimedia such as text, image, audio and video, video is a dominant component in terms of the performance of proxy server due to its traffic characteristics. For the fast caching process, caching sequences for videos are obtained to decrease both the buffer size and the required bandwidth and saved into metafiles in advance. Then, we present a novel caching and replacing algorithms for multimedia objects based on the metafiles. Finally, experimental results are provided to show the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.     

一种有资源适应性的transcoding代理缓存机制

在基于transcoding代理的流媒体服务系统中,CPU和网络是两种潜在的瓶颈资源.本文提出了一种有资源适应性的transcoding代理缓存机制,统一考虑CPU和网络的资源需求,以提高系统的服务能力.首先推导了多版本缓存策略下网络收益和CPU收益的计算方法.通过引入一个时变的影响因子 α (t),给出了缓存系统聚合资源收益的表达.在此基础上给出了单个对象的缓存价值函数,并设计了RAC替换算法.实验表明RAC具有较好的资源适应性和系统吞吐率.     

基于媒体用户访问行为偏好模型的代理缓存算法

目前,代理缓存技术广泛应用于改善流媒体传输的服务质量.文章从实际用户日志文件的分析出发,利用发现的用户浏览流媒体对象时的行为分布模型,提出了一种新的视频流媒体缓存算法.仿真结果证明,该算法可以通过记录很少的用户访问信息获取较高的性能表现.     

An empirical study on user access to entertainment streaming media

I. Introduction Streaming media has been widely used over the Internet in recent years. However, the growing use in streaming media, which generally has large size, can have a significant impact on the user perceived latency and network congestion. A popular approach to reduce the response time and backbone bandwidth consumption is to deploy proxy caches at the edge of the Internet. Due to the large size and different popularity for different part of the streaming video, it is not practical …     

Performance Analysis of Proxy Caching for VOD Services With Heterogeneous Clients

Proxy-caching strategies, especially prefix caching and interval caching, are commonly used in video-on-demand (VOD) systems to improve both the system performance and the playback experience of users. However, because these caching strategies are designed for homogeneous clients, they do not perform well in the real world where clients are heterogeneous (i.e., different available network bandwidths and different sizes of client-side buffers). This paper investigates the problems caused by heterogeneous client-side buffers. We analyze the theoretical performance of these caching strategies, and then, derive cost functions to measure the corresponding performance gains. Based on these analytical results, we develop a caching strategy that employs both prefix caching and interval caching to minimize the input bandwidth of a proxy. The simulation results demonstrate that the bandwidth requirements of a proxy implementing our caching strategy are significantly lower compared to adopting prefix caching or interval caching alone.     

Scalable proxy caching of video under storage constraints

Proxy caching has been used to speed up Web browsing and reduce networking costs. In this paper, we study the extension of proxy caching techniques to streaming video applications. A trivial extension consists of storing complete video sequences in the cache. However, this may not be applicable in situations where the video objects are very large and proxy cache space is limited. We show that the approaches proposed in this paper (referred to as selective caching), where only a few frames are cached, can also contribute to significant improvements in the overall performance. In particular, we discuss two network environments for streaming video, namely, quality-of-service (QoS) networks and best-effort networks (Internet). For QoS networks, the video caching goal is to reduce the network bandwidth costs; for best-effort networks, the goal is to increase the robustness of continuous playback against poor network conditions (such as congestion, delay, and loss). Two different selective caching algorithms (SCQ and SCB) are proposed, one for each network scenario, to increase the relevant overall performance metric in each case, while requiring only a fraction of the video stream to be cached. The main contribution of our work is to provide algorithms that are efficient even when the buffer memory available at the client is limited. These algorithms are also scalable so that when changes in the environment occur it is possible, with low complexity, to modify the allocation of cache space to different video sequences.     

基于网络代价的流媒体缓存策略研究

该文构造了一种新的流媒体缓存效用函数,该函数综合考虑流媒体节目的流行度特性及传输网络的代价参数;设计了一种针对多视频服务器、基于网络代价的流媒体缓存分配与替换算法(Network Cost Based cache allocation and replacement algorithm, NCB)。仿真实验结果显示,NCB算法有效提高了缓存命中率,降低了传送流媒体所消耗的总体网络代价;该算法在网络结构复杂、节目数量庞大的Internet流媒体应用环境中表现出较优越的性能。     

A bird's eye view of Web caching research [book review]

The article is a review of the book: Web Caching and Its Applications, written by S.V. Nagaraj and published by Springer, 2004. Web caching technology improves client download times and reduces network traffic by caching frequently accessed copies of Web objects close to the clients. The primary research issues in Web caching are where to cache copies of objects (cache placement), how to keep the cached copies consistent (cache consistency), and how to redirect clients to the optimal cache server (client redirection). Web caching systems' design space is huge, and building a good caching system involves several issues. Over the past decade, researchers have carried out a tremendous amount of work in addressing these issues. In Web Caching and Its Applications, S.V. Nagaraj aims to provide a bird's eye view of this research. He has exhaustively surveyed the literature and summarized the results of several research publications. The author concludes that the book can serve as a reference tool for researchers and for graduate students working on Web systems. However, its approach isn't suitable for Web administrators or students who are new to the field.     

Considering User Behavior and Multiple QoS Supports in Multimedia Streaming Caching

With the prevalence of video-on-demand (VOD) services as well as the diffusion of various multimedia devices, caching in a multimedia streaming server is becoming increasingly important. However, due to some peculiar characteristics of multimedia objects and user activities in streaming services, design of an efficient caching system becomes a more challenging problem compared to the traditional caching systems. This paper discusses some important issues that are of interest in the domain of multimedia streaming caching and presents a new cache management scheme for multimedia streaming servers. Our new scheme considers different streaming rates of multimedia objects as well as the inter-arrival time between two consecutive requests on an identical object. It also considers user activities in requesting and playing multimedia contents. Trace-driven simulations with real world VOD traces show that the proposed scheme improves the performance of multimedia streaming systems significantly.     

Traffic Modeling and Proportional Partial Caching for Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems generate a major portion of the Internet traffic, and this portion is expected to increase in the future. We explore the potential of deploying proxy caches in different Autonomous Systems (ASes) with the goal of reducing the cost incurred by Internet service providers and alleviating the load on the Internet backbone. We conduct an eight-month measurement study to analyze the P2P traffic characteristics that are relevant to caching, such as object popularity, popularity dynamics, and object size. Our study shows that the popularity of P2P objects can be modeled by a Mandelbrot–Zipf distribution, and that several workloads exist in P2P traffic. Guided by our findings, we develop a novel caching algorithm for P2P traffic that is based on object segmentation, and proportional partial admission and eviction of objects. Our trace-based simulations show that with a relatively small cache size, a byte hit rate of up to 35% can be achieved by our algorithm, which is close to the byte hit rate achieved by an off-line optimal algorithm with complete knowledge of future requests. Our results also show that our algorithm achieves a byte hit rate that is at least 40% more, and at most triple, the byte hit rate of the common web caching algorithms. Furthermore, our algorithm is robust in face of aborted downloads, which is a common case in P2P systems.      

网络缓存协作的实现方法

介绍了网络缓存发展的趋势:网络缓存协作。说明了网络缓存协作所要解决的问题,列举了网络 缓存协作的几种模型及相应的有代表性的协议,介绍了解决代理裁剪的几种方案。     

Limitations and benefits of cooperative proxy caching

Cooperating proxy caches are groups of HTTP proxy servers that organize to share cached objects. This paper develops analytical models for proxy cooperation which use speedup in user response time as the performance metric. Speedup expressions are derived for the cooperation upper bound, a proxy mesh, and a three-level proxy hierarchy. The equations compare fundamental design approaches by separating the proxy organization for object delivery from the mechanism for object discovery. Discovery mechanisms analyzed for the mesh and hierarchy models include ideal discovery, Internet cache protocol (ICP) query, and distributed metadata directories. Equations are evaluated using parameter estimates from experiments and from analysis of cache trace logs. Results indicate that proxy cooperation is marginally viable from the standpoint of average user response time, and that the miss penalty for the hierarchy renders it less viable than the mesh. Proxy cooperation can, however, reduce the variability in user response time and the number of long delays. A trace-driven simulation shows that caching constraints have little effect on cooperation performance due to request filtering by lower level caches.     

CDN架构下流媒体代理缓存策略的研究

在流媒体点播系统中,现有的CDN架构下的缓存策略并没有很好地解决骨干网带宽资源浪费的问题。为了降低骨干网带宽、启动延迟及网络负载不平衡及更好地支持点播过程中的VCR操作,本文在CDN的流媒体系统架构基础上,结合原有前缀缓存及分段缓存策略,提出一种新的基于代理服务器及备用代理服务器的缓存策略,以缓解系统对骨干网络带宽的需求,并在理论上有效节约了代理服务器的缓存资源,降低了用户点播的启动延迟。     

基于Linux的Squid代理系统的研究和实现

Squid是Linux平台下流行的高性能应用层代理服务器软件,常用于搭建代理服务器或者网页服务器的前置缓存服务器。文中主要介绍了在Linux系统下使用Squid建立代理服务器,通过缓存、访问控制等机制来实现高效、安全、低成本的代理服务。在此基础上,结合企业具体情况,研究实现了多级架构、双机互备、访问日志分析等功能。最后对代理加速、反向代理在企业的应用实现进行了展望。     

An overview of web caching replacement algorithms

The increasing demand for World Wide Web (WWW) services has made document caching a necessity to decrease download times and reduce Internet traffic. To make effective use of caching, an informative decision has to be made as to which documents are to be evicted from the cache in case of cache saturation. This is particularly important in a wireless network, where the size of the client cache at the mobile terminal (MT) is small. Several types of caching are used over the Internet, including client caching, server caching, and more recently, proxy caching. In this article we review some of the well known proxy-caching policies for the Web. We describe these policies, show how they operate, and discuss the main traffic properties they incorporate in their design. We argue that a good caching policy adapts itself to changes in Web workload characteristics. We make a qualitative comparison between these policies after classifying them according to the traffic properties they consider in their designs. Furthermore, we compare a selected subset of these policies using trace-driven simulations.