Effect of caching on routing-table lookup in multimedia environment

An attempt is made to investigate the validity and effectiveness of caching for routing-table lookup in multimedia environments. Multimedia traffic, like voice, data and video, is characterized by the burstiness which is represented in terms of the coefficient of variation. The general expression obtained from an approximate analysis of the cache scheme proposed indicates that the burstiness of traffic has a significant impact on caching performance. If the coefficient of variation of traffic exceeds unity, the demonstrated advantages of caching are significant. The converse is true when the coefficient of traffic is less than unity. The results obtained from simulations show that in the case of data traffic, the demonstrated advantage of caching is dramatic, and in the case of voice traffic, the superiority of caching is moderate. For video traffic, however, caching has less gain due to the smooth nature of video traffic