Cooperative popularity-aware MPEG-4/MPEG-7 streaming proxy system

Real-time multimedia services over network greatly arouse users´ interests in multimedia objects. To decrease the influence of unstable network upon the quality of real-time multimedia services and to reduce the traffic loads of servers, we´ve implemented an MPEG-4/MPEG-7 streaming proxy system that can reduce client perceived startup latency and efficiently improve the utilization of the storage resources in streaming proxies. By distributing information of cached data between neighboring proxies in the same cluster, our cooperative streaming proxy system can redirect a client´s request to another suitable proxy, or fetch-and-relay media objects if all proxies in the same cluster do not cache the requested object. Moreover, a popularity-aware caching policy is designed to make better use of the cache capacity among a cluster of neighboring streaming proxies; consequently, cache hit ratio can be further improved. The performance evaluation of our system is presented to demonstrate the improvements mentioned above.