Multimedia Caching Strategies for Heterogeneous Application and ServerEnvironments

  • Authors:
  • Asit Dan;Dinkar Sitaram

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY 10532/ E-mail: asit@watson.ibm.com;IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY 10532/ E-mail: sitaram@watson.ibm.com

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

In a multimedia system, storage and bandwidth are critical resources since any presentationrequires a large volume of data to be delivered in real-time. Caching ofmultimedia documents in local storage can alleviate large retrieval bandwidthrequirements. An important requirement for a multimedia caching policy is toguarantee continuous delivery even when a stream is served from cache. Itshould also cope with dynamic changes in workload and heterogeneity arisingfrom large and small multimedia files. The proposedGeneralized Interval Caching (GIC) policy, that cachesintervals between successive streams of a large file as well as entire smallfiles, satisfies all the above criteria. A caching policy needs to cope withadditional challenges in a large scale distributed multimedia environmentconsisting of many heterogeneous servers. The issues include a) routing ofrequests to ensure good cache hits in each server, and b) balancing of loadsacross servers. For routing of requests, we introduce the notion of anasset group and propose an affinity routing policy basedon this concept. Finally, we adapt the GIC policy for load balancing acrossservers.