Media Caching Support for Mobile Transit Clients

In this paper, we consider the design of caching infrastructure to enhance the client-perceived performance of mobile wireless clients retrieving multimedia objects from the Internet. We consider three primary issues: location of the cache, size of the cache, and management policy for the cache. We consider both infrastructure-oriented caching at the Access Point (AP), as well as peer-assisted caching at the mobile clients. Simulation is used as the methodology for evaluation and comparison of caching strategies. The simulation results show that AP caching is generally more effective than client-side caching, that adequate performance is achievable with a mix of rather modest AP and client-side caches, and that Least Frequently Used (LFU) is the most effective cache replacement policy. Additional simulation experiments show that our results are robust across different request generation rates and client turnover rates.