Streaming media content delivery in the Internet has become increasingly demanding in many important application areas, such as education, medical research and practice, news media, and entertainment and gaming industries. Although the proxy caching technique has been widely and successfully used for textbased Web content delivery, it is not suitable for streaming media due to the general huge sizes of media objects and the rigorous requirements of continuous and timely streaming, which demand dedicated and continuous bandwidth for a long period of time. To significantly improve the quality of Internet streaming services with low cost and high quality, the project will design and implement Next Generation Internet Proxy Systems that include effcient and complex streaming functions and resource coordination and provisioning capability in the proxy.
The proposed project will develop and analyze a set of algorithms for streaming caching with interactive requests, resource-constrained transcodings, and for resource provisioning and coordination of different types of cached objects, and will produce a real system by implementing core streaming functions, accurately prefetching media segments to ensure good streaming quality, and enabling format-independent streaming in the proxy.
