Caching Multicast Protocol For On-Demand Video Delivery

Despite advances in networking technology, the limitation of the server bandwidth prevents multimedia applications from taking full advantage of next-generation networks. This constraint sets a hard limit on the number of users the server is able to support simultaneously. To address this bottleneck, we propose a Caching Multicast Protocol (CMP) to leverage the in-network bandwidth. Our solution caches video streams in the routers to facilitate regional services in the immediate future. In other words, the network storage is managed as a huge `video server\u27 to allow the application to scale far beyond the physical limitation of its video server. The tremendous increase in the service bandwidth also enables the system to provide true on-demand services. To assess the effectiveness of this technique, we develop a detailed simulator to compare its performance with that of our earlier scheme called Chaining. The simulation results indicates that CMP is substantially better with many desirable properties as follows: (1) it is optimized to reduce traffic congestion; (2) it uses much less caching space; (3) client workstations are not involved in the caching protocol; (4) it can work on the network layer to leverage modern routers