Self-Organizing Wide-Area Network Caches
Abstract
A substantial fraction of all network traffic today comes from
applications in which clients retrieve objects from servers. The
caching of objects in locations "close" to clients is an
important technique for reducing both network traffic and response
time for such applications. In this paper we consider the benefits
of associating caches with switching nodes throughout the
network, rather than in a few hand-chosen locations. We also
consider the use of various self-organizing or
active cache management strategies for
organizing cache content. We evaluate caching techniques using both
simulation and a general analytic model for network caching. Our
results indicate that in-network caching can make effective use of
cache space. In particular, self-organizing caching schemes yield
better average round-trip latencies than more traditional approaches,
while requiring much smaller caches per node.