COPACC: A Cooperative Proxy-Client Caching System for On-Demand Media Streaming

Alan T. S. Ip, Jiangchuan Liu, John C. S. Lui

Abstract: Proxy caching is a key technique to reduce transmission cost for on-demand multimedia streaming. However, its effectiveness is limited by the insufficient storage space and weak cooperations among proxies and their clients. In this paper, we propose COPACC, a novel cooperative proxy-and-client caching system that combines the advantages of both proxy caching and peer-to-peer (P2P) client communications. We propose a comprehensive suite of protocols to facilitate the interactions among different network entities in COPACC. We also develop an efficient cache allocation algorithm to minimize the aggregated transmission cost of the whole system. Simulation results demonstrate that COPACC achieves remarkably lower transmission cost. Moreover, it is much more robust than a pure P2P system in the presence of node failures.