RTP-based caching of streaming media

Methods and approaches to caching of streaming media over the Internet have undergone significant development in recent years. The most widely used approaches are those based on selective caching and variations on it such as prefix caching. Caching the initial frames from a media stream improves startup latency by sending the prefix (the cached initial frames) to the client upon request and simultaneously downloading the remaining frame. By choosing the real-time protocol (RTP) packet as the caching unit, caching server is relieved from the overhead of extracting the media streams and re-packetizing them. Moreover, a method is developed for synchronizing the last packets of the prefix with the initial packets of the suffix so that they form one complete stream from the client's point of view.