Using multicast for streaming videos across wide area networks

In this paper, we study streaming multiple videos from a remote server to asynchronous clients through a group of proxies, using multicast on both the wide area server-proxy paths and the local area proxy-client paths. In this setting, we present an algorithm to determine the optimal cache allocation among videos at each proxy and develop an efficient streaming video distribution scheme. Our evaluations show the benefits of even a small proxy cache and quantify the gains from using multicast on the server-proxy paths.