Information caching for delivery of personalized video programs on home entertainment channels

The synergy between computing and information systems promises to herald a new epoch in which users not only have access to mundane services, such as television, radio, and telephones, but they also have access to an entirely new variety of entertainment services that are automatically customized to suit their individual needs. The authors explore the architectural considerations that underlie the realization of personalized multimedia entertainment services over metropolitan-area broadband networks, and devise near-optimal information caching strategies to determine when, where, and for how long video programs must be cached, so as to minimize the cumulative storage and network costs borne by users.<<ETX>>