An integrated Scheme to Distribute Segmented Streaming Media over Hierarchical Caches

The emergence of the Internet as a pervasive communication medium has led to the rise of many applications of streaming media. However, because of their distinct statistical properties and user viewing patterns, traditional delivery and caching schemes for web objects such as HTML files or images can not be efficiently applied to streaming media such as audio and video. In this paper, we therefore propose an integrated caching scheme for streaming media with segment-based caching and with hierarchically distributed proxies. Firstly, each stream is divided into segments and their caching algorithms are considered to determine how to distribute the segments into different level proxies efficiently. Then, by introducing two kinds of segment priorities, segments replacing algorithms are proposed to determine which stream and which segments should be replaced when the cache is full. Finally, a web friendly caching scheme is proposed to integrate the streaming caching with the conventional caching of normal web objects. Performance of the proposed algorithms is verified by carrying out simulations.