Efficient cache management policies for streaming proxies supporting complete and partial video playback

The dramatic increase of streaming media traffic on the Internet have led to bandwidth bottleneck and video playback delay. Several applications that require continuous streaming playback are suffering from the existing media systems. In order to serve streaming media traffic, which is sensitive to timely data transmission, proxy servers have been incorporated into the network. This paper addresses some critical issues and challenges of cache management for proxy caching media streaming. In the first part of the paper, we present a cache management method suitable when clients watch the requested videos completely. Subsequently we introduce methods supporting partial video view assuming that most accesses are for a few popular videos, and that videos are likely to be watched only partially. Our event-driven simulations have shown that the cache admissions policies we have introduced (i) improve the byte-hit ratio and (ii) significantly reduce the fraction of user requests with delayed starts, compared to existing methods in the literature.