An Evaluation of Two Policies for Placement of Continuous Media in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

This paper focuses on a greedy data placement strategy for a mesh network of peer-to-peer devices that collaborate to stream continuous media, audio and video clips. The greedy placement strategy, termed Simple, strives to maximize the number of references served by the local storage of a peer. We analyze two policies to realize this placement: Frequency-based and Byte-hit. The first sorts clips based on their access frequency, assigning the frequently accessed clips to each node. Byte-hit computes the frequency of access to each byte of a clip, sorts clips based on this value, and assigns those with the highest byte-hit value to each node. Both have the same complexity and almost identical implementations. A simulation study shows Byte-hit is superior to Frequency-based for two reasons. First, it maximizes the number of peers that can simultaneously display their referenced clips. Second, it is more robust to error in access frequencies. In all our experiments, Byte-hit performs almost identical to the optimal placement strategy.