Performance evaluation of hierarchical proxy servers for multimedia services

Service delay is one of the most important criteria in the performance of multimedia services. Thus, minimizing the delay is a challenging issue when networks are spread in a large scale. Proxy servers can reduce the response time in both Web and multimedia services. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical proxy architecture for multimedia services. To analyze the impact of the proxy deployment in an operator network, we define an analytic model to compare proxy architectures in terms of the response time. Using this model, we analyze the service response time with and without proxy servers under different architectures for both multimedia and Web-based traffic. Through numerical results, we show that the addition of more tiers to the proxy hierarchy reduces the response time, resulting in the improvement of service quality.