Proxy caching mechanisms with quality adjustment for video streaming services

The proxy mechanism widely used in WWW systems offers low-delay data delivery by means of "proxy server." By applying proxy mechanisms to video streaming system, we expect that high-quality and low-delay video distribution can be accomplished without introducing extra load on the system, in addition, it is effective to adapt the quality of cached video data appropriately in the proxy if user requests are diverse due to heterogeneity in terms of the available bandwidth, end-system performance, and user's preferences on the perceived video quality. In this paper, we propose proxy caching mechanisms to accomplish high-quality and low-delay video streaming services. In our proposed system, a video stream is divided into blocks for efficient use of cache buffer. A proxy cache server is assumed to be able to adjust the quality of cached or retrieved video blocks to requests through video filters. We evaluate our proposed mechanisms in terms of the required buffer size, the play-out delay and the video quality through simulation experiments. Furthermore, to verify the practicality of our mechanisms, we implement our proposed mechanisms on a real system and conducted experiments. Through evaluations from several performance aspects, it is shown that our proposed mechanisms can provide users with a low-latency and high-quality video streaming service in a heterogeneous environment.