Journal of Digital Image Processing and Computer Vision

Authors: Abhinand R K, Afsal A Azeez, Nikhin Raj K K, Eldo P Elias, Jisha P Abraham, Joby George

Abstract: Video streaming has become the leading contributor to the explosive growth of Internet traffic. As a key system parameter of video apps, cache threshold plays an important role in regulating the downloading behavior of a system, and directly affects the efficacy of video streaming. In this paper, we first conduct a series of well designed experiments to understand the mechanism of cache management in the OS and investigate the impact of cache threshold on the performance of video streaming. The experiments show that the current static configuration of cache thresholds in the OS cannot well balance the tradeoff between cost incurred by unconsumed content and user quality of experience. To achieve cost-effective video streaming, this paper further proposes a control-theoretic cache management algorithm called smart cache with adaptive thresholding (SCAT), which can intelligently tune cache thresholds to satisfy user preferences. The complexity of cache management and optimization can be decreased extensively by the SCAT strategy, facilitating its easy integration with the OS kernel codes. Finally, we implement and evaluate our proposed scheme on the real platform and the experimental results verify that our proposed scheme achieves significant gain over other alternative approaches. Compared to the default scheme, SCAT achieves over40% reduction of unconsumed content cost.