A Scalable and Cooperative Caching Scheme in a Distributed VOD System

In distributed streaming media server clusters, by adopting cooperative caching technique, the free cache memory of all the servers in the cluster can be used more efficiently. It will help raise the hit rate of the cache and reduce disk accesses, resulting in the improvement of the overall throughput of cluster. In this paper, a novel distributed caching model called scalable and cooperative caching (SCC) is presented. SCC makes use of each server to perform the caching task and redirects the request to the proper server in the cluster to make the cache scheme more efficient. This way, SCC can provide high scalability and throughput in clustered servers with a reasonably small amount of communication among hosts. Simulation results show that SCC is an effective caching strategy providing significant performance gains in clustered video servers.