A Comparison of Block-Based and Clip-Based Cooperative Caching Techniques for Streaming Media in Wireless Home Networks

Wireless home networks are widely deployed due to their low cost, ease of installation, and plug-and-play capabilities with consumer electronic devices. Participating devices may cache continuous media (audio and video clips) in order to reduce the demand for outside-the-home network resources and enhance the average delay incurred from when a user references a clip to the onset of its display (startup latency). In this paper, we focus on a home network consisting of a handful of devices configured with a mass storage device to cache data. A cooperative caching technique may manage the available cache space at the granularity of either a clip or individual blocks of a clip. The primary contribution of this paper is to evaluate these two alternatives using realistic specifications of a wireless home network, identifying factors that enable one to outperform the other.