Distributed caching and coding in VoD

Caching decreases content access time by keeping contents closer to the clients. In this paper we show that network coding chunks of different contents and storing them in cache, can be beneficial. Recent research considers caching network coded chunks of same content, but not different contents. This paper proposes three different methods, IP, layered-IP and Greedy algorithm, with different performance and complexity. Simulation results show that caching encoded chunks of different contents can significantly reduce the average data access time. Although we evaluate our ideas using Video on Demand (VoD) application on cable networks, they can be extended to broader contexts including content distribution in peer-to-peer networks and proxy web caches.