Headlight prefetching for mobile media streaming

Abstract

Multimedia information services in mobile environments are becoming more and more important with the proliferation of 3G technologies. Media streaming, in particular, is a promising technology for providing services such as news clips, live sports, and hot movies on the fly. To avoid service interruption when the users keep moving, proper data management strategies must be employed. We propose a new headlight prefetching technique for the streaming access points to deal with the uncertainty of client movement and the requirement of seamless service hand-off. For each mobile client, we maintain a virtual fan-shaped prefetching zone along the direction of movement similar to the headlight of a moving vehicle. The overlapping area and the accumulated virtual illuminance of the headlight zone on a particular cell determines the degree and volume of prefetching to be made by the streaming access point of that cell. Headlight prefetching solves the issues of identifying the streaming access points responsible for prefetching, the timing and the amount of data to prefetch in a single mechanism which is simple and effective. Simulation results demonstrate that our techniques can significantly decrease streaming disruptions, reduce bandwidth consumption, increase cache utilization and improve service response time.