QoS-adaptive proxy caching for multimedia streaming over the Internet

This paper proposes a quality-of-service (QoS)-adaptive proxy-caching scheme for multimedia streaming over the Internet. Considering the heterogeneous network conditions and media characteristics, we present an end-to-end caching architecture for multimedia streaming. First, a media-characteristic-weighted replacement policy is proposed to improve the cache hit ratio of mixed media including continuous and noncontinuous media. Secondly, a network-condition- and media-quality-adaptive resource-management mechanism is introduced to dynamically re-allocate cache resource for different types of media according to their request patterns. Thirdly, a pre-fetching scheme is described based on the estimated network bandwidth, and a miss strategy to decide what to request from the server in case of cache miss based on real-time network conditions is presented. Lastly, request and send-back scheduling algorithms, integrating with unequal loss protection (ULP), are proposed to dynamically allocate network resource among different types of media. Simulation results demonstrate effectiveness of our proposed schemes.