Caching Techniques for Streaming Multimedia over the Internet

Existing solutions for streaming multimedia in the Internet do not scale in terms of object size and number of supported streams. Using separate unicast streams, for example, will overload both network and servers. While caching is the standard technique for improving scalability, existing caching schemes do not support streaming media well. In this paper, we propose a complete solution for caching multimedia streams in the Internet by extending existing techniques and proposing new techniques to support streaming media. These include segmentation of streaming objects, dynamic caching, and self-organizing cooperative caching. We consider these techniques in an integrated fashion. We implemented a complete caching architecture called SOCCER using the network simulator ns-2 and evaluate the effectiveness of each proposed technique and compare them to alternative caching solutions. Keywords—Streaming Media, Caching, Proxy.