Cooperative caching techniques for continuous media in wireless home networks

With wide spread deployment of wireless home networks, management of data across devices is becoming increasingly important. This is especially true for continuous media (audio and video clips) because they are large in size and are streamed at a pre-specified rate to support a display free from disruptions and delays. Caching of clips across devices is an effective way to improve key quality of service (QoS) metrics including the fraction of requests serviced successfully when the home's connection to the outside infrastructure is lost (data availability), number of devices that may stream and display their referenced clips simultaneously (throughput), and the average delay incurred from when a user references a clip to the onset of its display (average startup latency). In this paper, we focus on home networks consisting of a handful of devices and present a novel cooperative caching technique named Cont-Coop. Cont-Coop controls the content of participating caches based on the asymmetric bandwidth of wireless connections between devices. We compare this technique with an alternative that does not control the content of cooperative caches, showing Cont-Coop is superior when the access pattern to clips is skewed. In addition, we show cooperative techniques enhance all the aforementioned QoS metrics when compared with a greedy caching technique.