Nicholas J. P. Race, Daniel G. Waddington
& Doug Shepherd
Lancaster University, UK
Abstract:
As technological advances continue to be made, the
demand for more efficient distributed multimedia systems
is also affirmed. Current support for end-to-end QoS is
still limited; consequently mechanisms are required to
provide flexibility in resource loading. One such
mechanism, caching, may be introduced both in the end-system
and network to facilitate intelligent load balancing
and resource management. We introduce new work at
Lancaster University investigating the use of transparent
network caches for MPEG-2. A novel architecture is
proposed, based on router-oriented caching and the
employment of large scale dynamic RAM as the sole
caching medium. The architecture also proposes the use
of the ISO/IEC standardised DSM-CC protocol as a basic
control infrastructure and the caching of pre-built
transport packets (UDP/IP) in the data plane. Finally,
the work discussed is in its infancy and consequently
focuses upon the design and implementation of the
caching architecture rather than an investigation into
performance gains, which we intend to make in a
continuation of the work.
