An information-aware QoE-centric mobile video cache

Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in the volume of video traffic in mobile settings. In this paper, we present the design of a mobile video-centric proxy cache, named iProxy, that offers improved performance in terms of both hit rates and streaming quality. Our thesis in designing iProxy is that we need to elevate the traditional view of caching from "data" to "information" in order to optimally meet the stringent requirements of video streaming in mobile settings. iProxy relies on recent advances on information-bound references (IBRs) to collapse multiple related cache entries into a single one, improving hitrate while lowering storage costs. iProxy incorporates a novel dynamic linear rate adaptation scheme to ensure high stream quality in face of channel diversity and device heterogeneity. Our evaluation of iProxy using realistic traffic traces shows that it can improve hitrate, but we need to use novel information-aware replacement policies for optimal performance. We show that our linear encoder can adapt well to changes in bandwidth, and yield better bit rates, lower buffering and lower start up delays than state-of-the-art schemes.