Efficient segment-based video transcoding proxy for mobile multimedia services

To support various bandwidth requirements for mobile multimedia services for future heterogeneous mobile environments, such as portable notebooks, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and 3G cellular phones, a transcoding video proxy is usually necessary to provide mobile clients with adapted video streams by not only transcoding videos to meet different needs on demand, but also caching them for later use. Traditional proxy technology is not applicable to a video proxy because it is less cost-effective to cache the complete videos to fit all kinds of clients in the proxy. Since transcoded video objects have inheritance dependency between different bit-rate versions, we can use this property to amortize the retransmission overhead from transcoding other objects cached in the proxy. In this paper, we propose the object relation graph (ORG) to manage the static relationships between video versions and an efficient replacement algorithm to dynamically manage video segments cached in the proxy. Specifically, we formulate a transcoding time constrained profit function to evaluate the profit from caching each version of an object. The profit function considers not only the sum of the costs of caching individual versions of an object, but also the transcoding relationship among these versions. In addition, an effective data structure, cached object relation tree (CORT), is designed to facilitate the management of multiple versions of different objects cached in the transcoding proxy. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms companion schemes in terms of the byte-hit ratios and the startup latency.