A client caching scheme for interactive video-on-demand

Video-on-demand trials at Monash University have shown that video in educational applications is used in a highly interactive fashion and that during a single session a significant proportion of video is examined more than once. We propose a caching scheme where video, once retrieved from the server, is cached locally on the client for the remainder of the session. We use statistics of reuse gathered during our trials to show that caching could result in bandwidth savings of up to 36%. In designing cache management schemes, an understanding of the nature of reuse is useful. We obtain this through an analysis of interactive jumps. We show that the distance of interactive jumps and the time between them are both log-normally distributed, and not, as has commonly been assumed, exponentially distributed.