Selecting the most suited cache strategy for specific streaming media workloads

Streaming media usage on the Web has recently increased by over 100% a year, and Video-on-Demand applications represent 40% of the Internet traffic. To improve the quality of streaming media delivery, a proxy server using cache strategies placed closer to end users is one of the main solutions used by service providers. The problem faced by cache managers is the difficulty decide, given workload characteristics such as number of objects, popularity distribution, object size etc, which strategy should be used to achieve the best performance. This work presents a deep evaluation of how traditional approaches behave over a wide range of scenarios and suggests which cache strategy should be used, given a specific workload; furthermore, it also introduces two new strategies that perform better than the others in the majority of evaluated scenarios.