Efficient Support of Streaming Videos through Patching Proxies in the Cloud

Abstract

Multimedia streaming applications such as mobile conferencing, e-learning and mobile cinema are becoming popular for the Internet and mobile devices. Patching can enable a client to receive multicast streaming by listening to ongoing transmission of the same video clip in order to reduce retransmission from the media server. However, multimedia streams multicasting to clients must be stored in the client buffer in advance; most fractions of ongoing streaming frames are lost due to limited space. The authors first propose a patching cache scheduling algorithm to patch and cache the shared frames of the ongoing streams on cloud-based patching proxy servers. The patching proxy cloud is responsible for patching and caching streaming data and mobile devices in the same cloud share bandwidth and cooperatively stream video frames to distribute the load. The simulation results show that the proposed patching proxy cloud can efficiently improve the cache utility, decrease the user-perceived latency, and reduce the transmission overhead between the proxy and the original media server when a video clip is very popular.