An Effective Proxy Caching and Rate Control Mechanism for Transporting Multimedia Streams over the Internet

Abstract

Recently, the demand for multimedia service is increasing dramatically, but this service may cause the bottleneck of Internet due to the bandwidth requirement and storage constraint of multimedia data. Streaming proxy server, much similar to general proxy server, is a useful architecture that can ease the load of original video server and shorten the response time while serving clients. However, existing techniques for caching documents in general proxy server is not appropriate for caching multimedia data that requires much more storage size. Hence, in this paper, we propose a streaming proxy architecture that stores portions of each video program according to its popularity. Additionally, we use Fibonacci function to divide the video data into variable-sized segments to speedup the data allocation and cache replacement. During the transmission of video data for each session, we also propose a transmission rate control mechanism based on exponential function to achieve higher bandwidth utilization and lower data loss rate. According to our preliminary analysis and simulation results, our techniques have positive results compared with other conventional methods.