A unifying co-operative web caching architecture

Network caching of objects has become a standard way of reducing network traffic and latency in the web. However, web caches exhibit poor performance with a hit rate of about 30%. A solution to improve this hit rate is to have a group of proxies form co-operation where objects can be cached for later retrieval. A cooperative cache system includes protocols for hierarchical and transversal caching. The drawback of such a system lies in the resulting network load due to the number of messages that need to be exchanged to locate an object. This paper proposes a new co-operative web caching architecture, which unities previous methods of web caching. Performance results shows that the architecture achieve LIP to 70% co-operative hit rate and accesses the cached object in at most two hops. Moreover, the architecture is scalable with low traffic and database overhead. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.