Peer-Assisted Caching for Scalable Media Streaming in Wireless Backhaul Networks

This paper presents a method for supporting wireless media streaming using a cache that is distributed across the mobile devices in the network. The performance of this scheme is compared to traditional institutional server (IS) caching on a network with a bandwidth constrained wireless backhaul. In addition to traditional caching hit ratio metrics, the paper studies how caching affects the call drop ratio due to limited backhaul bandwidth. These results indicate that the distributed caching method provides better service than IS caching as the number of users is increased. Finally, this paper also presents a scheme for conserving mobile device energy by limiting its participation in the caching scheme. Results show that most of the benefit of the distributed cache can be realized even with relatively few cache assists from each client.