An effective approach to video staging in streaming applications

Due to advances in network technologies, providing streaming services over the Internet has gained in popularity. Because a video stream is in compressed format, it is naturally with the variable bit rate (VBR) property and its traffic is highly burst. With the installation of a video proxy between access networks (e.g. local area networks, LAN) and backbone networks (e.g. wide area networks, WAN), video staging is proposed to cache part of the requested video into the video proxy close to clients. In this mechanism, the video can be streamed using a constant bit rate (CBR) network service across the backbone WAN and the WAN bandwidth requirement can be significantly reduced. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called "caching selected after smoothing" (CSAS), to handling video staging. The aim of the CSAS algorithm is to integrate our previous video caching and smoothing technique so as to reduce the required WAN bandwidth even more. Experiments on benchmark videos using different evaluation indices, including the proxy storage requirement, the WAN bandwidth requirement, and the WAN bandwidth utilization, show that our approach is more effective than the conventional "cut after smoothing" (CAS) algorithm.