Reducing network traffic using two-layered cache servers for continuous media data on the Internet

Abstract

Continuous media objects, due to large volume and real time constraints in their delivery, are likely to consume much network bandwidth. Generally, proxy servers are used to hold the frequently requested objects so as to reduce the network traffic to the central server but most of them are designed for text and image data. The authors propose a two-layered network cache management policy for continuous media object delivery over the Internet. With the proposed cache management scheme, in each LAN, there exists one LAN cache and each LAN is further divided into a group of sub-LANs, each of which has its own sub-LAN cache. Each object is also partitioned into two parts: the front-end and rear-end partition. They can be loaded in the same cache or separately in different network caches according to their access frequencies. By doing so, cache replacement overhead could be reduced as compared to the case of the full size data allocation and replacement; this eventually reduces the backbone network traffic to the origin server.