Energy-efficient video distribution systems have become an important tool to deal with the rapid growth in Internet video traffic and to maintain the environmental sustainability of the Internet. Due to the limitations in terms of energy-efficiency of the conventional server centric method for delivering video services to the end users, storing video contents closer to the end users could potentially achieve significant improvements in energy-efficiency. Because of dissimilarities in user behavior and limited cache sizes, caching systems should be designed according to the behavior of user communities. In this paper, several energy consumption models are presented to evaluate the energy savings of single-level caching and multi-level caching systems that support varying levels of similarity in user behavior. The results show that single level caching systems can achieve high energy savings for communities with high similarity in user behavior. In contrast, when user behavior is dissimilar, multi-level caching systems should be used to increase the energy efficiency.
© 2011 Optical Society of America