Lifecycle-Aware Online Video Caching

The current explosion of video traffic compels service providers to deploy caches at edge networks. Nowadays, most caching systems store data with a high programming voltage corresponding to the largest possible 'expiry date', typically on the order of years, which maximizes the cache damage. However, popular videos rarely exhibit lifecycles longer than a couple of months. Consequently, the programming voltage can instead be adapted to fit the lifecycle and mitigate the cache damage accordingly. In this paper, we propose LiA-cache, a Lifecycle-Aware caching policy for online videos. LiA-cache finds both near-optimal caching retention times and cache eviction policies by optimizing traffic delivery cost and cache damage cost conjointly. We first investigate temporal patterns of video access from a real-world dataset covering 10 million online videos collected by one of the largest mobile network operators in the world. We next cluster the videos based on their access lifecycles and integrate the clustering into a general model of the caching system. Specifically, LiA-cache analyzes videos and caches them depending on their cluster label. Compared to other popular policies in real-world scenarios, LiA-cache can reduce cache damage up to 90 perce, while keeping a cache hit ratio close to a policy purely relying on video popularity.