Virtual interval caching scheme for interactive multimedia streaming workload

Abstract

We carefully believe that server workload for interactive multimedia service exhibits different characteristics from legacy application, e.g. ftp server, web server, ASP server and etc., and that there are greater chance of improvement with better understanding of streaming workload. In this work, we present a novel buffer management algorithm for interactive multimedia streaming workload. We carefully examine the workload traces obtained from several streaming servers in service. The analysis results show that most users exhibit non-sequential access pattern using VCR-like operations such as jump backward and jump forward. We exploit the workload characteristics of the VCR-like operation and develop a buffer caching algorithm called Virtual Interval Caching scheme. Simulation based experiment shows that the proposed buffer management scheme yields better performance than the legacy schemes.