Domical cooperative caching for streaming media in wireless home networks

Wireless home networks are widely deployed due to their low cost, ease of installation, and plug-and-play capabilities with consumer electronic devices. A challenge of these environments is how to manage data across devices. This is specially true for continuous media (audio and video clips) which are large in size and delay sensitive. Caching of clips across wireless devices may improve user experience, measurable by different Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as throughput and startup latency. Moreover, caching at the edge of the network reduces the demand for the infrastructure outside the home. In this study, we present Domical, a novel cooperative caching technique designed for streaming media in wireless home networks consisting of a handful of devices. Domical is novel because it considers both asymmetry of the available wireless link bandwidth and heterogeneity of available cache space. We provide a comprehensive description of Domical, presenting its key knobs, and the behavior of the algorithm with different granularity of data caching (block versus clip).