Impacts of Device Caching of Content Fractions on Expected Content Quality

TL;DR

This paper investigates fractional caching of video content to enhance expected video quality, demonstrating that caching high-quality chunks and utilizing multiple quality levels can significantly improve user experience, especially under good channel conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel caching policy that stores video chunks at different quality levels, leveraging content encoding and channel cooperation to optimize video quality.

Findings

Fractional caching improves expected video quality.

Caching high-quality chunks is more effective.

Performance gains are notable with good channel conditions.

Abstract

This paper explores caching of fractions of a video content, not caching of an entire content, to increase the expected video quality. We first show that the highest-quality content is better to be cached and propose the caching policy of video chunks having different qualities. Our caching policy utilizes the characteristics of video contents that video files can be encoded into multiple versions with different qualities, each file consists of many chunks, and chunks can have different qualities. Extensive performance evaluations are conducted to show that caching of content fractions, rather than an entire content, can improve the expected video quality especially when the channel conditions is sufficiently good to cooperate with nearby BS or helpers.