``Investigating performance insights of segments-based proxy caching of 
streaming media strategies" 

Songqing Chen, Bo Shen, Susie Wee, and Xiaodong Zhang 

Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Multimedia Computing and  
Networking (MMCN'04), Santa Clara, CA, January 21-22, 2004.  

Abstract

In general, existing segment-based caching strategies target one of the
following two performance objectives: (1) reducing client startup delay
by giving a high priority to cache the beginning segments of media
objects, or (2) reducing server traffic by caching popular segments of
media objects. Our previous study has shown that the approach targeting
the second objective has several advantages over the first one. However,
we have also observed that the effort of improving server traffic
reduction can increase client startup delay, which may potentially
offset the overall performance gain. Little work so far has considered
these two objectives in concert.  In this paper, we first build an
analytical model for these two types of typical segment-based caching
approaches.  The analysis on the model reveals the nature of the
trade-off between two performance objectives and the bounds of each are
given under certain circumstances.  To provide a feasible way to
evaluate different strategies, we propose a new comprehensive
performance metric based on the analysis.  To understand this performance
trade-off, we restructure the adaptive-lazy segmentation strategy with a
heuristic replacement policy to improve overall performance.  The
evaluation results confirm our analysis and show the effectiveness of
our proposed new performance metric.