Joint server scheduling and proxy caching for video delivery

We consider the delivery of video assets over a best-effort network, possibly through a caching proxy located close to the clients generating the requests. We are interested in the joint server scheduling and prefix/partial caching strategy that minimizes the aggregate transmission rate over the backbone network (i.e. average output server rate) under a cache of given capacity. We present multiple schemes to address various service levels and client resources by enabling bandwidth and cache space tradeoffs. We also propose an optimization algorithm selecting the working set of asset prefixes. We detail algorithms for practical implementation of our schemes. Simulation results show that our scheme dramatically outperforms the full caching technique. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.