On designing a shortest-path-based cache replacement in a transcoding proxy

The technology advance in network has accelerated the development of multimedia applications over the wired and wireless communication. To alleviate network congestion and to reduce latency and workload on multimedia servers, the concept of multimedia proxy has been proposed to cache popular contents. Caching the data objects can relieve the bandwidth demand on the external network, and reduce the average time to load a remote data object to local side. Since the effectiveness of a proxy server depends largely on cache replacement policy, various approaches are proposed in recent years. In this paper, we discuss the cache replacement policy in a multimedia transcoding proxy. Unlike the cache replacement for conventional web objects, to replace some elements with others in the cache of a transcoding proxy, we should further consider the transcoding relationship among the cached items. To maintain the transcoding relationship and to perform cache replacement, we propose in this paper the RESP framework (standing for REplacement with Shortest Path). The RESP framework contains two primary components, i.e., procedure MASP (standing for Minimum Aggregate Cost with Shortest Path) and algorithm EBR (standing for Exchange-Based Replacement). Procedure MASP maintains the transcoding relationship using a shortest path table, whereas algorithm EBR performs cache replacement according to an exchanging strategy. The experimental results show that the RESP framework can approximate the optimal cache replacement with much lower execution time for processing user queries.