Management of cacheable streaming multimedia content in networks with mobile nodes

We discuss the delivery of cacheable streaming content in a network with mobile nodes. Caching and regional replication are important techniques for traffic localization and reduction in load on the network and the content server. However traditional caching schemes alone cannot suffice for localization of streaming multimedia traffic in networks with mobile nodes. This is mainly because of limited geographical scope of caches. Mobile nodes can easily move out of such geographical scopes in the duration of a long session such as that of a typical streaming multimedia. In this paper we present a novel technique called cache handoff that allows a mobile node to keep switching to the most appropriate caching proxy as it moves, thus counteracting the adverse mobility effects and maximizing traffic localization. Simulation results show that this technique improves the average delay by almost 25% for a very low cache hit ratio of 0.1. This technique also gives increasingly better performance for larger session durations.