``SRB: Shared Running Buffers in proxy to exploit memory locality of 
multiple streaming media sessions"  

Songqing Chen, Bo Shen, Yong Yan, Sujoy Basu, and Xiaodong Zhang 

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing  
Systems (ICDCS'04), Tokyo, Japan, March 23-26, 2004.  

Abstract

With the falling price of the memory, an increasing number of multimedia
servers and proxies are now equipped with a large DRAM memory space. 
Caching media objects in the memory of a proxy helps to reduce network 
traffic, disk I/O bandwidth requirement, and data delivery latency.  The
running buffer approach and its alternatives are representative
techniques to cache streaming data in the memory. However, there are two 
limits in the existing techniques. First, although multiple running 
buffers for the same media object co-exist in a given processing period, data
sharing among the multiple buffers is not considered.  Second, user
access patterns are not insightfully considered in the buffer
management.  In this paper, we propose two techniques based on 
shared running buffers (SRB) in the proxy to address these limits.
Considering user access patterns and characteristics of the requested
media objects, our techniques adaptively allocate memory buffers to
fully utilize the currently buffered data of streaming sessions, with
the aim to reduce both the server load and the network
traffic. Experimentally comparing with several existing techniques, we
show that the proposed techniques have achieved significant performance
improvement by effectively using the shared running buffers.