PP caching: Proxy caching mechanism for YouTube videos in campus network

Abstract

Nowadays, YouTube has become a very popular website offering video sharing service. YouTube accounts for a significant portion of Internet traffic in global and local networks. Many techniques have been implemented to deliver videos smoothly to every user. Streaming proxy servers are put into action to reduce user-perceived latency as well as network resource utilization. "What is viewed next" can be guessed from relationships of YouTube videos. This paper proposes PP caching mechanism that benefits from prefix caching and prefetching technique. Certain parts of selected videos are prefetched and kept at the proxy cache. The experimental results show that startup delay decreases and cache hit rate increases when the proposed mechanism is tested against actual YouTube traces from two campuses.